Thematic structure of sustainability reports of the hospitality and tourism sector: A periodical, regional, and format-based analysis

ABSTRACT

This study explores the thematic structure of sustainability reports (SRs) of the hospitality and tourism (H&T) industry. The contents of the SRs were analyzed by combining text mining techniques and network analysis. The periodical analysis showed that sustainability reporting in the H&T industry is improving in terms of addressing a higher number of corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues across the period. Continental SRs indicated that although Europe is ahead of other regions, they all need to improve and present richer content to the report readers. The comparison of SRs, according to whether they were prepared with a specific reference to the GRI framework or not, also revealed some differences. Overall, this analysis highlights the H&T sector’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of the topicality of its SRs and provides implications accordingly.

KEYWORDS:

• Thematic structure
• CSR
• sustainability reports
• GRI
• hospitality and tourism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Global Reporting Initiative.

2 See the papers of Coles et al. (2013), Jones et al. (2016), and Font and Lynes (2018).

3 See the paper of Serra-Cantallops et al. (2017).

4 By doing so, they determined the CSR disclosure level of a company by assigning one if an item of the CSR disclosure index was reported or zero if it was not reported.

5 They determined the top ten hotel companies according to the list published in Hotels magazine in 2005.