Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) measurement in the tourism and hospitality industry: views from a developing country

ABSTRACT

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) measurement in the tourism and hospitality industry remains in its infancy, particularly missing a developing country’s perspective. Rooted in stakeholder theory, we generated a semantic network from ESG reports and conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with different sub-sector professionals to triangulate ESG measurement guidelines for the industry. The results highlight modifications that could be made to waste and environmentally friendly initiatives in environmental measurements, employee benefits and product quality in social measurements, and R&D and governance structures in governance measurements. Additionally, internal resource support and external awareness changes can ensure that companies comply with ESG guidelines.

KEYWORDS:

• ESG measurement
• standards
• stakeholder theory
• mixed method
• semantic network
• tourism and hospitality industry
• developing countries
• tourism marketing
• Asia pacific

Acknowledgments

Professional English language editing support provided by AsiaEdit (asiaedit.com).

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Beijing International Studies University [QNYC23A005].