Serviced Accommodation, Environmental Performance and Benchmarks
2001
The establishment of benchmarks as a tool to aid the evaluation
and review of the performance of hospitality and tourism enterprises
in a number of areas, e.g., financial appraisal, grading schemes, is
comparatively long established. More recently, benchmarks have been
developed for the accreditation of business in such areas asTQMand IiP.
One area that has been comparatively ignored is that of environmental
performance of the enterprises. This is particularly notable, given the
rise of attention and debate over sustainable development and the need
for a balance between economic growth and the quality of the environment
which has generated much debate.
The quintessential importance of this latter aspect�the quality of the
environment�to the development of tourism has long been recognised,
and since the mid-1980s has generated substantial attention to the impact
of tourism on the physical environment. In combination, this attention
has led to the development of �sustainability indicators for tourist destinations.�
However, there has been a substantial lack of attention to the
environmental performance of the enterprises involved and their impacts
on the environment�taken in its widest senses This weakness, and the absence of suitable benchmarks, emerged in
the initial stages of a major project designed to evaluate the environmental
performance of the tourism sector in the Lake District of England; an
area listed in the top 50 of the most attractive tourist destinations in the
world in 2000. Thus, the first stage of the project required the development
of a set of suitable indicators designed to assess the environmental
performance of the enterprises involved. This article discusses the development
and derivation of these indicators, with specific focus on serviced
accommodation, and subsequently the establishment of a range of
benchmarks which may not only be applied in evaluating progress in future
assessment of the environmental performance of this sector in the
Lake District but also may be applied in other destinations throughout
the world. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery
Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2001 by The Haworth Press,
Inc. All rights reserved.]
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