Abstract
Sustainability is an important element of modern industries: it means the maintenance of balance between the industry’s operating facilities and its environment, and hotels should invest in sustainability development. For the hospitality field, which focuses on the organization of people living in hotels, it means zero-emission, waste recycling, supply chain optimization, and creating a safe and convenient environment. Various literature discusses how those mentioned sustainability practices are implemented and how they benefit the hospitality industry. Zero-emission is reached through optimal energy consumption and recycling all toxic wastes, such as food and plastic waste. Supply chain optimization means that all food and other goods necessary for customers and hotel staff are quickly and safely delivered, and no possible food spoilage is allowed. Knowledge management and knowledge agents may increase the hotel staff’s awareness of sustainable practices and their implementation. Lastly, a safe environment for the customers is reached through a user-friendly atmosphere and establishing trustful relationships with them. All those practices are important, as sustainable businesses are more stable than unsustainable, less dangerous for the environment, and more attractive to customers.
Introduction
Environmental issues are an important challenge for the modern world, and the hospitality business is one of the fields where those issues are strongly marked. This industry deals with people’s accommodation and organization of various events; in that way, it is responsible for everything happening with them. Food, energy, waste, and communication management are examples of what is necessary for the organization of a sustainable hotel. They need to deal with wastes inevitably left by customers, environmental pollution, and energy management: they should be sure that all customers are happy and that nature is undamaged. A hotel should be a place with zero-emission of dangerous compounds, optimized energy flow, waste recycling facilities, and a safe environment for all its customers. Such hotels will be much more competitive than traditional ones, which ignore sustainable practices and technologies or are unwilling to pay for them.
There are three questions to be reviewed in this paper: why the sustainable development principles are important for the hospitality industry, how knowledge management may help with it, and how they may be implemented? All of them should be answered positively, as sustainable management should be used in the whole hotel industry: one will see arguments for this. First, it may be used to reduce losses in the case of calamities, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, as the hospitality field is especially susceptible to them (Filimonau, 2020). Actual average knowledge about sustainability principles is low among hospitality managers (Farhadi Andarabi & Tunç Hassan, 2019). Thus, the hotel’s personnel should be taught to be familiar with those practices and be able to use them (Martínez-Martínez et al., 2019a). Technologies for energy control, waste recycling, and communication facilitation make hotels more competitive (Floričić, 2020). Thus, the importance of sustainable development for the hospitality business is central to the current paper: while it makes hospitality businesses stable and competitive, unsustainability leads to crises and environmental destruction.
Literature Review
Research articles and textbooks widely represent environmental issues and sustainability in the hospitality industry, how they are solved, and how hotels that deploy sustainable business practices have more competitive advantages. The article by Farhadi Andarabi & Tunç Hassan (2019) is a review of environmental management practices in the Turkey hotel: it reveals the current issues in those practices, such as hotel staff’s ignorance of sustainable practices and technologies. Such practices, such as water and plastic management, are critical for hotels to recover after global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Filimonau, 2020). Green hotels, the actual implementation of sustainable technologies, use recycling technologies to make their space cleaner and better to live in; thus, people prefer them over the classical hotel. (Floričić, 2020). In contrast, the unsustainable approach is wrong for the tourism and hospitality industries, as it is unstable, leading to the destruction of the location and a higher risk of crises (Kullapa Soratana et al., 2021). Lastly, knowledge management, which is the teaching of hotel staff members about sustainable technologies and practices and how they may be implemented, is an extremely helpful approach to solving sustainability issues with little cost. (Martínez-Martínez et al., 2019a; Martínez-Martínez et al., 2019b). Thus, scientific research results are totally agreeing that the hotel industry should implement sustainability practices, and in another case, it will have bad consequences.
Discussion
Sustainable Development and Its Importance for the Hospitality Sector
The hospitality industry is the creation of places for the temporary living of many people. This activity is always connected with the need to manage resources and wastes, which are inevitable during the accommodation. Unsustainable practices, such as the top-down management approach, are unresponsive to those challenges and cannot manage them successfully (Kullapa Soratana et al., 2021). In that way, there is a need for new, sustainable development practices which will renew the hospitality industry.
First, the hospitality sector is susceptible to various external disruptions, and sustainable development may help in preventing such instability. The industry proved its fragility when the COVID-19 pandemic led to the drastic collapse of hospitality businesses around the world due to closed borders and various restrictions (Filimonau, 2020). While the decrease was inevitable, as the tourist flow reduced sharply, sustainable business practices aimed at waste reduction and recycling may prevent the loss of profits.
Second, as the hospitality industry works with people willing to stay in hotels and other facilities, it is also responsible for all waste produced by them. While the first point states that sustainable development helps maintain profits, it is also an element of corporate responsibility, essential for establishing good relationships between the business and clients (Floričić, 2020). Trust is an important element of the business, and customers are willing to choose hotels that meet their expectations and offer a safe and interesting environment.
In that way, there are at least two reasons why hospitality businesses should adopt sustainable practices: immunity to external disruptions and increased corporate responsibility. The former results from the increased stability and reduced operational costs that may be reached by using waste recycling and energy management technologies and practices (Filimonau, 2020). While those practices may be costly at first, they are rewarding: reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction and profits. Corporate responsibility means that sustainable hotels will attract more customers and establish trustful relationships with them (Floričić, 2020). Thus, sustainable practices will make the hospitality business more stable and give it more future perspectives, while unsustainable businesses are more likely to fail due to external influences and internal instabilities.
Knowledge Management in the Hospitality Sector
Knowledge management is gathering and organizing the knowledge actual for a particular industry. Knowledge agents are people who are willing to increase their knowledge in fields connected with sustainable development and invest it in the hospitality sector (Martinez-Martinez et al., 2019b). In that way, they work as drivers for the development of the entire sector. The knowledge actual for the hospitality sector is supply chain management, life cycle management, ecology, waste and resource management, and communications (Kullapa Soratana et al., 2021). Those who have it and can implement it have a great competitive advantage in the industry.
A lack of knowledge about waste and resource management and ecology and communications is the main problem in promoting sustainability in the hospitality industry. Hotel staff often do not care about their hotel’s energy and water consumption, have no idea about sustainable and ecological practices, and think that those practices will be costly (Farhadi Andarabi & Tunç Hassan, 2019). It means that knowledge management is underrated in the hospitality field: hotel managers often pay little attention to that. They used to think that technologies were expensive and even unnecessary, although, in reality, they may solve many problems actual for the hospitality business. The concept of organizational learning may resolve this issue: it means the continuous teaching of the hotel personnel about sustainable practices and technologies that may be used for that, increasing their knowledge and awareness (Martínez-Martínez et al., 2019a). In that way, the modern hospitality industry is knowledge-intensive and requires solutions that consider its need for knowledge: the hotel industry should be aware of that.
Green Hotels as the Actual Solution
The hospitality industry uses modern technologies to reach sustainable development goals. Examples of them are customer relation management (CRM) services, mobile applications for quick communication, big data tools for customer data analysis, energy management systems, and design innovations (Floričić, 2020). Implementation of those technologies and tools allows hotels to increase the efficiency of their functioning while decreasing costs. The mentioned concept of organizational learning is the method by which hotel staff may be taught to use sustainable practices on a daily basis (Martínez-Martínez et al., 2019a). In that way, they will be able to implement cutting-edge technologies to solve actual industry challenges.
In addition to technological improvement, sustainability is also based on maintaining good relationships between tourists living in the hospitality services. If there is a specific local community, which is often the case for tourist destinations, the needs and interests of this community should also be considered (Farhadi Andarabi & Tunç Hassan, 2019). Trustful communication with the customers makes them familiar with the local community and ensures their safety and good experience (Floričić, 2020). It may be reached easier by using digital technologies, such as smartphone apps with in-build chats or direct communication via social networks. Those approaches ensure that hotel management may improve the hotel’s performance while decreasing the waste level and, thus, supporting the environment, and this is why all hotels should implement sustainable practices.
Conclusion
Throughout the paper, one may see that sustainable practices have great importance for the development of the hospitality industry. Unsustainable approaches, on the other hand, have no perspective for the future. They are vulnerable to rapid changes or calamities, often dangerous to the environment, and are less attractive to potential customers who want a safe and friendly environment. First, sustainable development practices make the hotel more stable for external disruptions, as their supply chain and energy consumption are better organized. They have opportunities to become more profitable and better meet their customers’ expectations. Second, knowledge management helps implement sustainable development practices in hotels, as they are knowledge-intensive and require the usage of modern technologies. Third, green hotels, based on principles of sustainability, waste recycling, and good customer experience, will have increased competitiveness and attractiveness compared to classical ones. Waste recycling allows them to reach zero-emission, and optimized energy consumption makes them more effective. Summarizing, the sustainability question has extreme importance for the hospitality industry, and the more hotels will implement sustainable practices, the better outcomes will be for the whole industry.
References
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Floričić, T. (2020). Sustainable solutions in the hospitality industry and competitiveness context of “Green Hotels.” Civil Engineering Journal, 6(6), 1104–1113. Web.
Kullapa Soratana, Landis, A. E., Fu Jing, & Hidetsugu Suto. (2021). Supply chain management of tourism towards sustainability. Springer.
Martínez-Martínez, A., Cegarra Navarro, J. G., García-Pérez, A., & Moreno-Ponce, A. (2019a). Environmental knowledge strategy: Driving success of the hospitality industry. Management Research Review, 42(6), 662–680. Web.
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