Sustainable Luxury in Hotels and Resorts: Is It Possible?

Abstract

The increasing affluence of countries such as India, China and Brazil supports a growing global middle class interested in travel, consumption and luxury purchases. This trend presents some serious challenges for addressing a range of sustainability issues in tourism. Rising awareness of these sustainability issues has resulted in a number of luxury brands and businesses adopting sustainability practices. This paper begins by describing this response in tourism using an approach adapted from general sustainability analysis, the Drivers, Pressures, State, Impacts, and Responses (DPSIR) framework to understand the context for the development of the concept of sustainable luxury tourism. It then examines three cases of sustainable luxury tourism experiences exploring the extent and nature of the sustainability strategies adopted. This analysis particularly examines the trade-offs required between luxury and sustainability. Overall the results suggest that while it is possible to improve the overall environmental and social performance of luxury tourism there are a number of ongoing tensions between sustainability and luxury that create difficulties for the management of this form of tourism. This conclusion has important consequences for the sustainability of international tourism overall given its growing dependence on outbound travel from these emerging economies.