Awarding Sustainable Asia-Pacific Hotel Practices: Rewarding Innovative Practices or Open Rhetoric?

Abstract

Award programmes facilitate recognition and reward of innovative practices creating industry benchmarks for world-class standards. Growing recognition and adoption of sustainability practices and corporate social responsibility charters amongst hotels internationally is nudging the sustainability paradigm. However, comprehensive empirical data, detailing and describing these practices are under examination. This paper examines sustainable hotel practices of Asia-Pacific hotels utilizing an exploratory inductive content analysis of self-reported award submissions. The submissions of 64 hotels to the Hotel Investment Conference Asia Pacific Sustainable (HICAP) Hotel Award scheme over 2009 and 2010 were analyzed. Three primary categories of sustainability practices were identified: operations-related, community engagement and design-related initiatives. A model of sustainable hotel practices is then proposed, which will assist hotel managers in benchmarking their organization to achieve higher levels of sustainability.