Suchergebnisse

Tourism is an activity that anyone can take part in, regardless of their age, gender, nationality or level of income. This makes tourism one of the most rapidly developing industries in the world. Despite the number of benefits which tourism produces, it also has significant negative impacts on the environment. To minimise the scope of these negative impacts, joint efforts combining tourism and environmental management are called for. This book examines the application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method and lifecycle thinking as a tool to generate more accurate and holistic appraisals of the environmental impacts of tourism. Looking at the issue of sustainability of tourism operations, the book evaluates how it can be improved. It highlights the potential of LCA to affect tourist behaviour and contribute to tourism policy-making and managerial practice. This book provides a valuable resource for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers interested in sustainable tourism, sustainable development and environmental impact assessment

Due to a steady growth of tourism, hotels in Nigeria generate disproportionate amounts of solid waste. Little is however known about what approaches, if any, Nigerian hoteliers adopt for its mitigation. This study has set to establish the approaches to managing solid waste and evaluate their effectiveness in a sample of hotels in Lagos. To this end, it has applied the method of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 17 hoteliers to reveal the role of organisational (managerial and staff attitudes, corporate policies), institutional (governmental policies) and consumption market related (consumer attitudes) factors in shaping the scope of solid waste mitigation. The interview results have demonstrated that Lagos hotels do very little to mitigate solid waste generation. This was attributed to the insufficient support received from the government, but also to the disinterest of hotel guests, managers and employees in environmental conservation. To improve the quality of solid waste management in Nigerian hotels, it is necessary to raise environmental commitment of managers and improve environmental awareness of guests and staff. Governmental involvement is required in the form of educating hotel guests and providing environmental training and 'green' incentives to hoteliers.

Purpose
Although virtual worlds, such as the Metaverse, can disrupt the hospitality sector, few empirical investigations have critically evaluated the scope and scale of this disruption from an industry perspective. This study aims to rectify this knowledge gap by exploring the opportunities and challenges of the Metaverse as seen by hospitality professionals.


Design/methodology/approach
This is a Delphi study conducted with UK-based senior hospitality industry practitioners experienced in designing and implementing digital innovations within their organisations.


Findings
The Metaverse is most likely to be adopted by hospitality organisations willing and able to take risks, such as large and/or chain-affiliated enterprises. The Metaverse will not replace traditional hospitality services but supplement and enhance them with new layers of service. The main applications are in the context of events and experiences. The Metaverse will also provide the "try before you buy" option, revealing the opportunities to design digital twins of physical businesses. Young and technology-savvy individuals are most likely to first adopt the Metaverse. The key challenges of the adoption are attributed to the technological unpreparedness of hospitality organisations; market immaturity; inflated customer expectations; a skills gap among hospitality employees; and regulatory issues. These challenges require the engagement of various stakeholders to create an operational and monitoring framework for hospitality organisations to embrace the Metaverse.


Practical implications
This study highlights how the Metaverse can disrupt the hospitality industry at the level of strategic planning and business operations.


Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first empirical investigations of the potential of the Metaverse from the viewpoint of hospitality industry practitioners.

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd The challenge of food waste in the foodservice sector of China is under-examined. This paper advances knowledge by exploring the food waste management practices adopted in a sample of Shanghai full-service restaurants. Through 22 in-depth semi-structured interviews with senior managers it establishes the significance of the food waste challenge and identifies Chinese food consumption habits as a major cause. Despite the pronounced role of consumers in food waste generation, restaurateurs largely fail to engage them in mitigation. To mitigate food waste occurring on customer plates, changes to the Chinese dining culture should be facilitated via nation-wide campaigns aiming to raise public awareness of food waste when eating out. The government of China should lead on the design of such campaigns, ideally involving celebrities for better consumer appeal and academics for the assessment of their effectiveness. The national government should also provide free-to-attend specialist training to restaurant managers and staff on how to mitigate food waste occurring in kitchens.

The hospitality industry generates substantial amounts of food waste. Although the issue has been politically recognised, it remains under-researched. Studies are limited in number and restricted in sectoral and geographical coverage. They have attempted to quantify and characterise food waste in hospitality ventures while the managerial approaches to its reduction have not been scrutinised. The coffee shop sub-sector of the hospitality industry has been entirely excluded from analysis. This study examined food waste in UK coffee shops through the managerial lens. While food waste represents a significant challenge, the managerial approaches to its minimisation are conservative and focus on disposal, rather than prevention. Lack of governmental support, imperfect legislation, irresponsible consumer behaviour and restricted internal resources inhibit application of more advanced managerial approaches. To enhance the effectiveness of food waste management within the sub-sector, targeted policy interventions designed to strengthen corporate commitments and facilitate pro-environmental changes in consumer behaviour are necessary.

Luxury hotels generate substantial carbon footprint and scholarly research is urgently required to better understand how it could be effectively mitigated. This study adopts a method of life cycle energy analysis (LCEA) to assess the energy and carbon performance of six luxury, five star, hotels located in Iran. The results of the energy and carbon assessment of luxury hotels in Iran are compared against the energy and carbon values reported in past hotel research. This current study finds that luxury hotels in Iran are up to 3–4 times more energy- and 7 times more carbon-intense than similar hotels examined in past research. Low cost of fossil fuels, international trade sanctions and the lack of governmental and corporate energy conservation targets discourage Iranian hoteliers from carbon footprint mitigation. To counteract poor energy and carbon efficiency of luxury hotels in Iran, it is important to relax economic sanctions, develop alternative energy sources, refine corporate energy conservation targets, regularly benchmark hotel energy performance and enable exchange of good practices amongst Iranian hoteliers.

Traditional foodstuffs play an important role in household food security. No research has, however, attempted to examine traditional foodstuffs in light of disasters and crises. Such research can provide a useful outlook on how traditional foodstuffs can aid households in a situation of disrupted food supply. This outlook becomes relevant in view of future disastrous events that can undermine household food security, especially in poor disadvantaged communities. This study examined the role of traditional foodstuffs during a major crisis. The study adopted an ethnographic perspective and the method of semi-structured household interviews to explore how traditional foodstuffs were used by communities in the city of Mosul, Iraq, under the ISIS administration and during the liberation war (2016-2017). The study showcased the critical role of traditional foodstuffs in survival of local households. It highlighted the importance of cross-generational knowledge of traditional foodstuffs in community preparedness for disasters and crises. The study proposed to integrate traditional foodstuffs into governmental strategies on household food security in Iraq, and beyond. It suggested including traditional foodstuffs in the humanitarian food supply chains in the regions prone to disasters and crises. Future research should examine the prerequisites for such inclusion, especially from the viewpoint of societal and political acceptance of traditional foodstuffs and methods of their production.