Environmental management practices in hotels at world heritage sites

Abstract

Heritage tourism is booming in emerging destinations, creating considerable sustainability challenges. The accommodation sector is an important area of action, yet taxonomies and empirical investigations of environmental management practices (EMPs) have not been tailored to the context of World Heritage Sites (WHSs). This study fills this gap by proposing a new taxonomy and framework featuring items of tangible and intangible heritage. Twenty-five interviews and a survey of 124 hotels across two sites were employed to examine EMPs and their determinants and to explore possible synergies between environmental performance and heritage. Results show that budget hotels, which use significantly less EMPs, prevail within both heritage sites’ boundaries. Guesthouses and boutique hotels, however, adopt a range of EMPs that blends technology and traditional knowledge and they are more likely to try to engage customers. The determinants for adoption are often individual values or exchanges of information with actors that include traditional heritage businesses. Customers instead exert a negative influence over the adoption of EMPs. The study advances the conceptualization of EMPs and their adoption in WHSs and provides insights for heritage managers and policymakers by showing that in the context of heritage, EMPs can include both technological and traditional approaches.

Keywords:

• Environmental management
• heritage management
• hotel management
• sustainable tourism
• malaysia
• mixed methods research

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Albert Francis Park, Professor Steven Pratt, Dr. Stephen Harwood, and Professor Karin Weber for their useful comments. I would also like to thank Dr. Wong Yee Tuan and Dr. Ang Ming Chee for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 A search with the query “TITLE(environmental OR green OR sustainable AND management OR practices OR strategies OR marketing OR innovation AND hotel OR hotels OR accommodation OR tourism) AND DOCTYPE(ar) AND PUBYEAR > 1999 AND PUBYEAR < 2021” was performed on SCOPUS.

2 To this search, five articles (Bohdanowicz, 2005; Tzschentke et al., 2008; Erdogan & Tosun, 2009; Yusof & Jamaludin, 2013; Mak & Chang, 2019) were added due to the unicity of EMP scales used.

3 In George Town, the laissez-faire policies gave rise to criticism by civil society organizations concerned with heritage conservation. However, when GTWHI, the heritage authority, decided to implement a compulsory Heritage Impact Assessment report, there was a huge backlash from hotel owners (see The Star Online, 2016). The required ‘Special Area Plan’ by UNESCO and related conservation guidelines were not published in the official gazette until late 2015 and were generally not strictly enforced.

4 According to Molina-Azorín (2012, p. 35), when a mixed method design has an “expansion” purpose, it employs different methods to assess different facets of a phenomenon; while “complementary” means that the design is used for clarifying, enhancing, or illustrating the results from one method with the results from the other method.

5 These details are cited in the text using ‘Respondent’ to be distinguished from ‘Interview.’

6 These included managers of GTWHI and of the Melaka WHSs as well as government officers in the Planning department and Heritage department. They were responsible for regulation and monitoring of the WHSs.

7 One owner commented: “The listing has caused a diaspora of traditional businesses and residents in the inner city. I hope the government will be more sensible when implementing new ideas to not hurt the local/traditional businesses who depends on locals to survive” (Respondent4).

8 In the case of the Shangri-La hotels, this certification is the ISO14001, while a local hotel obtained the Green Building Index (GBI) certification, a Malaysian rating tool for sustainability of the built environment.

9 The field research included visits to the Blue Mansion, which won a UNESCO accolade, and to other boutique hotels such as 23 Lovelane, the Yeng Keng hotel, the Penaga hotel, Casa del Rio, the Swiss heritage hotel and Hotel Puri. All hotels displayed unique ways of blending the original history and architecture of heritage buildings that also enhanced their environmental performance.

10 Interviews with hotel owners of six boutique hotels. An owner mentioned: “The restoration took two and a half years. I received MYR57,000 from Think City, which accounted to 7% of the overall cost of the renovation. Operation-wise we are profitable, but it will take 20 to 30 years to get back the money from the renovation” (Respondent49).

11 See for instance Respondent29: “It was by chance that I found this vacant shophouse. For me it was important to find it vacant, as I didn't want people to move out because of my interest in the property. It is in the very street where my parents used to live. [..] My goal [in opening this activity] was to help rejuvenate George Town by restoring this old shophouse and bring it to its former glory.”

12 The SAPs were gazetted after this research was conducted, and the monitoring and enforcement of such regulations at that time was scarce.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chow Yei Ching School of Graduate Studies scholarship, City University of Hong Kong.

Notes on contributors

Angela Tritto

Angela Tritto (Ph.D., City University of Hong Kong), is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Emerging Market Studies, HKUST. She is currently working on three interrelated research projects on the Belt and Road Initiative in Southeast Asia. Her research interests include management of innovation, environmental policies and technologies, heritage management, and sustainable development. She recently published several works in collaboration with a team of international scholars on the sustainability of the Belt and Road Initiative. Her past publications examine environmental innovations and the role of institutions in the management of World Heritage Sites in China and Malaysia.