Tanja Mihalič

A hotel sustainability business model: evidence from Slovenia

This research explores and develops a hotel sustainability business model (HSBM) to study the sustainability orientation of the Slovenian hotel industry. Based on a comparative analysis of the existing sustainability and triple bottom line models, the usual content of a three-line HSBM (economic, environmental and sociocultural) was extended to include customer satisfaction, environmental education and power to implement changes. Financial, marketing and tourism sustainability experts investigated best practices in sustainability measurements and gathered appropriate sustainability indicators; expert opinion and the Delphi method refined and reduced an initial 79 indicators to 36 operational indicators, able to fulfil the HSBMs sub-categories within the extended triple bottom line. The HSBMs concept was used to study the sustainability of Slovenian hotel firms to reveal how important these indicators are for hotel managers and do they monitor them. Results indicated strong importance and measurement of economic and marketing indicators, such as profitability and customer satisfaction. Following the socialist tradition, companies recognise the importance of human resources, but the importance of environmental education and awareness building, biodiversity, and the establishment of partnerships with stakeholders to implement sustainable tourism development are neglected. Economic performance was, for example, monitored by 66% of respondents, environmental performance by 28% and social performance by 42%.

Performance of Environmental Resources of a Tourist Destination: Concept and Application

Despite the apparent importance of destinations’ environmental resources, there appears to be little theoretical and applied research explicitly focusing on destination environmental supply. This research attempts to address this gap in the literature. First, it reviews and evaluates the body of research in tourism environmental resources and proposes a conceptual model to test their performance. The model combines tourism supply–demand view with importance–performance gaps and was used to survey tourism in Slovenia. The results show that the studied destination uses its environmental resources too extensively and that Slovenian environmental tourism experience does not meet visitors’ expectations. This finding challenges Slovenian policy makers, who position Slovenia as a green destination. The proposed model can form the basis for further conceptual and empirical research into the tourism contributions of environmental resources. In its present form, it can be used to examine environmental performance and to suggest policy implications for any destination.

Drivers of Destination Competitiveness in Tourism A Global Investigation

Debates about competitiveness and productivity are practically unexplored with respect to tourism. This article posits a productivity-related measure—total tourism contribution to GDP per employee in tourism—in order to examine destination competiveness. Comprehensive results based on a destination competitiveness model are obtained by analyzing tourism-specific and wider economy-based competitiveness factors. These are represented by six destination competitiveness factors measured by 55 indicators for 139 destinations over the period 2007–2011. Study findings demonstrate that tourism-specific factors, such as Tourism Infrastructure and Destination Management, are the major competitiveness drivers in developing countries, while destination competitiveness in developed countries depends on the tourism-specific factor of Destination Management as well as on wider economic conditions such as General Infrastructure, Macro-Environment, and Business Environment. The study offers a novel approach in the operationalization and estimation of a theoretically grounded and empirically validated tourism competitiveness model and discusses the implications for tourism policy.

Achieving destination competitiveness: an importance–performance analysis of Serbia

As a relatively new and under-researched tourism destination, Serbia provides an interesting context to assess destination competitiveness in conditions of global environmental changes and the additional challenges of transition from a socialist economy to a market-based economy. This article uses importance–performance analysis (IPA) to assess the importance of different activities to underpin tourism development in Serbia, as well as the industrys perceived performance in respect of these activities. There are a number of areas in which Serbian tourism industry considers itself to be underperforming in the implementation of activities to maintain destination competitiveness. This article analyses these results in detail using IPA as a diagnostic tool. Particular attention is paid to investigating the implications of the findings for both destination managers and private tourism operators in Serbia that can assist them to develop a focused action agenda to achieve and maintain destination competitive advantage. The approach can be used in other destinations to assess tourism ability to meet the challenges of global trends.

Integrated Destination Competitiveness Model: testing its validity and data accessibility.

Destination competitiveness has attracted much attention from researchers over the past two decades. The Integrated Destination Competitiveness Model has been used to explore destination competitiveness in many contexts including Australia, Korea, Slovenia, and Serbia. Given its popularity with tourism researchers and its application to destination competitiveness studies world-wide, it is appropriate to undertake a rigorous test of the destination competitiveness attributes identified in this model, their validity and indicator accessibility to researchers and practitioners. Testing the 83 destination competitiveness attributes of this major model can inform researchers about the appropriateness of the model structure, the validity of the groupings of destination competitiveness attributes, and the relevance of different indicators to destination attributes. The data used for testing are comprehensive, covering 139 countries worldwide in the period 2007 to 2011. The testing process confirms the value of the Integrated Model in understanding a destinations competitiveness indicators, the gains from which will be more informed policy making regarding the type of tourism development most likely to enhance resident quality of economic and social life.

Innovation, sustainable tourism and environments in mountain destination development: a comparative analysis of Austria, Slovenia and Switzerland

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the comparative tourism sustainability debate in the context of mountain tourism destinations. It is based on a published three-dimensional Mountain Destination Innovation Model (MDIM) which claims that tourism development depends on a destinations innovation levels, and is subject to different conditions in a variety of important destination environments (using that term in its broadest sense), including sociocultural, natural, political, legal and technological. The authors comparatively analyzed Austrian, Slovenian and Swiss mountain destinations, which are located in small countries in the Alpine region, and that makes their environments, innovation levels and stages of development relatively easy to compare. The analysis used 88 managers’ replies to a 72 element questionnaire employing both objective and subjective measures about performance with regard to MDIM dimensions. The findings confirm differences in the stages of tourism development, in innovation levels, as well as in the supporting role of their corresponding wider environments. Swiss and Austrian mountain destinations outperformed Slovenian in almost all respects, but not in protection and quality of the natural environment or in inherited sociocultural attractiveness, where significant differences were not determined. The findings could help development and tourism policy authorities to improve the factors that determine sustainable tourism destination development.

In pursuit of a more just international tourism: the concept of trading tourism rights

Research on sustainable tourism mainly focuses on incoming tourism, and destination perspectives and impacts, and less on the focus of this paper – outgoing tourism. In this context, direct and personal access to tourism represents an equal right to all world citizens. Because this right has not been exercised equally, the world is divided into two parts, excess and deprived, tourism citizens and their nation-states. This paper proposes a more just tourism system to balance the rights of tourists to travel, with the right to development, equal tourism participation, and consumption of world resources. It draws on theories from Nozick and Rawls on rights and justice to ground our model, backed by the work of other writers including Hultsman, Higgins-Desbiolles, Jamal, and Camargo. It expands the definition of just tourism to activate tourisms potential to become a developmental force in the existing socio-economic global order. This potential is realised through the use of market-based economic instruments for the implementation of a just tourism system. It suggests how to create financial flows towards third world states for their development and modernisation, using the concept of tradable tourism certificates, a concept tested in emissions control, population, and land use planning.

The changing role of ICT competitiveness: the case of the Slovenian hotel sector

The purpose of the article is to survey the role of information and communication technology (ICT) for hotel firm’s competitiveness. Based on competitive advantage factor (CAF) and resource theory, this article empirically tests ICT as one of several possible competitiveness factors. The research is focused on analyse of ICT competitiveness position over time, with special attention to different generations of ICT technologies. An electronic survey instrument has been used to collect Slovenian hotel manager’s opinion on competitiveness resources in 2000 and 2010. Hypothesis testing and cluster analyses has been applied, SPSS was also used. The articles findings indicate that hotels need time to recognise the competitiveness potential of every new resource, and once they start to implement it its importance may change over time. Some firms might be slower in implementing new ICT resources, yet, over time, the resource use converges among the firms. The process is repeated with every new ICT generation. The study informs firms and researchers on practical and research issues forthcoming with ICT progression. Research results directly benefits hotel managers by providing actual information on how to employ different generations of ICT. This contribution is a novel way of connecting a firm’s competitiveness with different web generations over time.

A portrait of Pauline Joy Sheldon

In ancient times, there existed in the country of Serendip, in the Far East, a great and powerful king by the name of Giaffer. He had three sons who were very dear to him. And being a good father and very concerned about their education, he decided that he had to leave them endowed not only with great power, but also with all kinds of virtues of which princes are particularly in need. (Boyle, 2000, p. 1)

Academic and hunter: a portrait of William C. Gartner

It is truly both a privilege and a challenge to present William (Bill) Craig Gartner. A privilege because Bill is one of the top tourism academics of modern times and rightly proud of his academic tourism work. A challenge because some things, using his words, exist above his academic mission and will never “change’’ (Gartner, 2011, p. 88). During autumn every year, this tall professor allows his academic work to suffer, takes his mysterious black dog and disappears into the open space of either North or South Dakota to chase flying ducks and pheasants. During winters, this same hunter disappears off the radar to go ice fishing. In springtime, he dives into the white water and on a raft he has made from tree logs drifts over the rapids, wherever the river may take him. And when he puts his hunting and fishing gear down, he never stops moving in the search for good wine and local cheese. Bill is always on the road, whichever vision – academic or non-academic – he is hunting. Knowing how importantly this other side of Bill complements his academic success, I do not dare to claim to know what his greatest achievements are: his work on tourism development (Gartner, 1996) and place branding (Gartner, 2011) or the size of the fish he caught while in the Artic and the size of the wild boar’s tusks he hunted on the Pannonian plains in Europe.