New Frontiers for Sustainability in Travel and Tourism—Corporate Responsibility on Combating Global Human Trafficking

Abstract

While embarked in pursuit of a renewed sustainability agenda as spelled out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, many travel businesses often concentrate on traditional approaches to resource management including environmental conservation, protection of biodiversity, judicious use of resources, etc. However, more recently, and particularly stemming from an updated conceptualization on corporate responsibility (Visser in Reframing corporate social responsibility: Lessons from the global financial crisis. Emerald, London, 2010a; Visser in J Bus Syst Gov Ethics 5(3): 1–17, 2010b), human rights and social justice issues such as the sexual exploitation of children gained new emphasis for most of the major travel and hospitality global brands, across the entire tourism sector. A first of its kind, the ‘Global Study on Sexual Exploitation of Children in Travel and Tourism’ (ECPAT International and Defence for Children-ECPAT Netherlands in Offenders on the move. Global study on sexual exploitation of children in travel and tourism, 2016) collected and analyzed data from all regions, and found that the travel sector has an extraordinary potential in critically intervening against human trafficking, with an emphasis on preventing and protecting child sexual exploitation. In this paper the global phenomenon of human sex trafficking is explored from a corporate responsibility perspective including its links to the travel and tourism sector. Examples of emerging innovative practices will be presented, including very recent case studies showing different paths taken to engage in preventing human trafficking by Marriott, Uber and by companies from the airline sector.