Corporate social responsibility: The disclosure-performance gap

As increased stakeholder pressure requires companies to be transparent about their CSR practices, it is essential to know how reliable corporate disclosure mechanisms are, testing the gap between corporate social responsibility claims and actual practice. This study benchmarks corporate social responsibility policies and practices of ten international hotel groups of particular importance to the European leisure market. We found that corporate systems are not necessarily reflective of actual operations, environmental performance is eco-savings driven, labour policies aim to comply with local legislation, socio-economic policies are inward looking with little acceptance of impacts on the destination, and customer engagement is limited. Generally larger hotel groups have more comprehensive policies but also greater gaps in implementation, while the smaller hotel groups focus only on environmental management and deliver what they promised. As the first survey of its kind in tourism, both the methodology and the findings have implications for further research. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd

Putting social impact assessment to the test as a method for implementing responsible tourism practice

The discourse on the social impacts of tourism needs to shift from the current descriptive critique of tourism to considering what can be done in actual practice to embed the management of tourism's social impacts into the existing planning, product development and operational processes of tourism businesses. A pragmatic approach for designing research methodologies, social management systems and initial actions, which is shaped by the real world operational constraints and existing systems used in the tourism industry, is needed. Our pilot study with a small Bulgarian travel company put social impact assessment (SIA) to the test to see if it could provide this desired approach and assist in implementing responsible tourism development practice, especially in small tourism businesses. Our findings showed that our adapted SIA method has value as a practical method for embedding a responsible tourism approach. While there were some challenges, SIA proved to be effective in assisting the staff of our test case tourism business to better understand their social impacts on their local communities and to identify actions to take

A responsible tourism perspective on tourist-host encounters in community-based tourism

The specifics around the attributes and complexities of successful encounters, the nature and equity of relationships and activities, and the impacts and trade-offs in the tourist-host interaction are often neglected. This chapter provides a framework for considering tourist-host interactions within a community-based tourism (CBT) context from a responsible tourism perspective. In particular, we demonstrate the value of a holistic approach for understanding the social dimensions of tourist-host interactions through an analysis of papers on CBT that have this as their dominant focus. The literature on tourist-host interactions reveals the potential of CBT to provide transformative tourist experiences, positive outcomes for host communities, and opportunities for mutually beneficial interactions. Conversely, it is also apparent that this interaction can lead to unfortunate outcomes if it is not responsibly planned and managed for mutual understanding and benefits