Environmental management practices in hotels at world heritage sites

Abstract

Heritage tourism is booming in emerging destinations, creating considerable sustainability challenges. The accommodation sector is an important area of action, yet taxonomies and empirical investigations of environmental management practices (EMPs) have not been tailored to the context of World Heritage Sites (WHSs). This study fills this gap by proposing a new taxonomy and framework featuring items of tangible and intangible heritage. Twenty-five interviews and a survey of 124 hotels across two sites were employed to examine EMPs and their determinants and to explore possible synergies between environmental performance and heritage. Results show that budget hotels, which use significantly less EMPs, prevail within both heritage sites’ boundaries. Guesthouses and boutique hotels, however, adopt a range of EMPs that blends technology and traditional knowledge and they are more likely to try to engage customers. The determinants for adoption are often individual values or exchanges of information with actors that include traditional heritage businesses. Customers instead exert a negative influence over the adoption of EMPs. The study advances the conceptualization of EMPs and their adoption in WHSs and provides insights for heritage managers and policymakers by showing that in the context of heritage, EMPs can include both technological and traditional approaches.