Author(s)

A. Sörensson, A.-M. Jansson

Abstract

Within the tourism industry, there is considerable focus on sustainable tourism and the fact that tourism service providers should be sustainable. One way for tourism service providers to address these issues and communicate their sustainability work is for instance through annual reports, sustainability reports and home pages. The aim with this study was therefore to explore and compare what kind of information concerning sustainability that Swedish tourism service providers present to stakeholders. A sustainability report is one way for tourism companies to be more legitimate and accountable toward their stakeholders. Data was collected from 60 tourism service providers (e.g. 20 hotels, 20 restaurants and 20 activity companies) in Sweden from their annual reports and sustainability reports as well as their home pages. They are large-sized tourism service providers with a yearly turnover of between 5 and 50 million euros. The result shows that very few companies make sustainability reports. There is also a difference between how and where they present their sustainability work. The companies often present more of their sustainability work on their homepage compared to in annual and sustainability reports. The conclusion is that hotels are more focused on environmental sustainability, restaurants are focused more on social sustainability and the activity companies have little information about their sustainability work.

Keywords

sustainability report, tourism service providers, hotels, restaurants, environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, social sustainability