ABSTRACT
402The environment has become one of the major issues facing not only the hospitality industry but also humankind, with the increasing acknowledgement that human activity is causing global climate change. In the tourism industry, the importance of the environment has long been recognized. Indeed, the concept of ‘sustainability’ originated and developed in this sector. This is largely because much of leisure tourism is based on visitation to places with natural or manmade resources that people can enjoy. Paradoxically, the more people seek out natural resources such as Ayers Rock in Australia or beaches in Thailand, and manmade attraction such as Egypt’s pyramids or Disneyworld, the less attractive they become. This is because the effect of visitation is to erode or reduce the very resource that is being visited. For example, in the Veneto region of Italy, hotels noticed a sharp downturn in business in the early 1990s. They discovered this was due to northern European visitors being dissatisfied with the region’s attitude to the environment. In response, hotels and tourism operators formed a consortium to demonstrate and promote green values. As a result, Hotel Ariston in Milan implemented an environmental policy and increased its occupancy by 15% (Ball et al. 2002: 112).
