Abstract
As we reach the fifth anniversary of the Declaration of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the tourism sector responsible for over 10% of the world’s GDP still does not have an open-source, sustainable management criteria that would enable and empower them to “walk the talk” to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap in the social sciences and business management literature by providing a theoretical Sustainable Strategic Management Model (SSMM) proposal for the Fourth Sector (4S), Small- and Medium-sized (SMEs) Hotel companies (4S-SM-HCs), which are committed and have the will to contribute firmly to the 2030 Agenda. Based on their corporate purpose and aligned with the SDGs, this article provides a holistic proposal with a multi-stakeholder approach, adding the SDG perspective. Through a qualitative research methodology based on two focus groups in which the main stakeholders and the management team of the 4S-SM-HC under examination took part, a theoretical SSMM is co-defined so that the hotel company can make significant contributions to the five areas of the SDGs. Basing their structure on the internationally recognized Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) Criteria and co-created through social learning, this SSMM proposes four strategic management axis and develops ten principles of ethical performance (PEP). The main contributions of this article are two: (1) to provide an ecosystemic SSMM proposal to the 4S-SM-HCs to allow them to make significant contributions to the SDGs, and (2) to facilitate a methodological framework with a multi-stakeholder approach and SDG perspective to enable them to contribute to the wellbeing of people, the community and the planet.
Highlights
On the fifth anniversary of the United Nations declaration on Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) with their 169 targets and 232 indicators [1], progress is uneven, and much remains to be done [2]
Considering the relevance of the empirical findings and the scarce previous literature on the subject, the results presented below have been summarized by highlighting the more unresolved aspects of the discussion of both Focus Group discussions (FG)
It is proposed to participants of both FGs to reflect and debate on the Principles of Ethical Performance (PEP) that should be contained within each of the four strategic axes of the Sustainable Strategic Management Model (SSMM), coinciding with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) criteria sections: (1) effective sustainable management; (2) social and economic benefits to the local community, minimizing negative impacts; (3) benefits to cultural heritage, minimizing negative impacts; and (4) benefits to the environment, minimizing negative impacts
Summary
On the fifth anniversary of the United Nations declaration on Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) with their 169 targets and 232 indicators [1], progress is uneven, and much remains to be done [2]. The health, social, and economic crisis caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus adds to the climate crisis, feeding back and aggravating each other [4,5] We are both witnesses to and victims of the severe consequences of the increase in average global temperature and its foreseeable worsening, mainly due to human activities [6,7] directly and negatively impacting the health of people and ecosystems [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), sponsored by the United Nations, points out that the climate crisis is but a structural symptom of a socio-ecological crisis that damages the planet and communities and is caused by the prevalence of economic growth and social welfare [19,20]
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