Abstract
Small accommodation businesses such as agritourism boarding houses (ATBHs) provide a large share of accommodating capacity in certain rural destinations. Despite their small accommodation capacity, ATBHs consume substantial quantities of water and energy; this consumption implies high environmental costs. The present study aims to explore opinions of ATBH owner-managers regarding water and energy consumption in their businesses, what motivates them to adopt environmental practices, and the specific saving measures used within the tourist accommodation units they manage. A qualitative research was conducted, using semi-structured interviews among 12 Romanian ATBH owner-managers. Data analysis revealed that the interviewed owner-managers understand the importance of natural resource conservation in tourist destinations but they are not willing or have insufficient financial, time, organizational resources, etc. to engage in serious water and energy saving initiatives. Moreover, most interviewed managers indicated that tourists cannot make a significant contribution to natural resources conservation in accommodation units and perceive water and energy saving systems as more effective than the environmental education of visitors in their facility. These findings may be useful to tourism policy-makers and environmental organizations in order to develop effective environmental strategies in ATBHs.
Highlights
Economic development, population growth, and increased stress in everyday life has led to an increased tourism interest in rural destinations, which are less polluted than urban areas and still preserve authentic cultural heritage [1,2,3,4]
The present paper focuses on a specific type of accommodation unit from rural areas (i.e., agritourism boarding houses (ATBHs)) from a developing post-communist country in the East European region (i.e., Romania), considering that, according to the authors’ knowledge, most studies regarding water and energy consumption were mainly based on international samples and focused on tourism businesses from developed countries
“In my opinion, a lot of water and energy is consumed in hotels (...) especially in Romania, where we are not used to saving water or energy or, in general, to have an environmentally-friendly attitude towards the nature
Summary
Population growth, and increased stress in everyday life has led to an increased tourism interest in rural destinations, which are less polluted than urban areas and still preserve authentic cultural heritage [1,2,3,4]. Tourism is posing a potential threat to rural resources, most acutely when they are exploited beyond their carrying capacities, and/or enterprises are not managed in a sustainable manner [5]. All these factors have led to the emergence of many environmental problems in rural tourism, such as environmental pollution, land degradation, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and more [6,7,8,9,10,11]. The main objective of the present study is to investigate owner managers’ opinions regarding water and energy consumption and saving within their ATBH units
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call