Sustainability reporting quality in the tourism sector: a focus on the hotel chains

In recent years, a general sense of awareness has been raised about the environmental impacts of human activities on our planet. Tourism is one of the most impactful sectors as its development affects local communities in multiple ways: the exploitation of energy, water, food, paper, and plastic by hospitality companies are proven to increase greenhouse gas emissions and depletion of raw materials. A growing number of companies, not only from the tourism sector, rely on sustainability, sometimes named as non-financial, reporting practices, to measure and communicate their approach towards sustainability. This research aims to contribute to the existing literature by analyzing such reporting systems to evaluate their quality and comparability in the tourism sector, with specific reference to the international hotel chains. Sustainability (or non-financial) reporting challenges companies to implement a real sustainable strategy and behavior, but the academic literature has already highlighted the risk that greenwashing attempts may be hidden behind sustainability reporting practices, especially by larger companies. Several studies have analyzed quality and completeness of information included in sustainability reports, but the existing literature has poorly investigated such reports in the tourism sector, especially for the hotel chains. The hotel chains indeed can be in theory, for the relevant dimension of their business, more subjected to risks of greenwashing. Starting from these premises, this research will contribute to the academic and professional debate by offering new insights concerning the quality of sustainability reports provided by international hotel chains. For this research, which constitutes a first exploratory study in this field, the world's top-ten companies for number of available rooms have been considered. From a methodological point of view, this work adopts a content analysis approach on the sustainability reports collected. The quality of these reports is analyzed through an assessment of six profiles of analysis: accuracy, clarity, timeliness, balance, comparability, and reliability. The aim of this article is to contribute to the development of the literature related to quality of sustainability reporting by adding the perspective of the tourism sector. The paper will also provide an assessment model able to measure the quality of sustainability (or nonfinancial) reporting for every kind of tourism organization. Moreover, the paper intends to give a contribution in relation to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Agenda: this research could help to evaluate how hotel chains are involved and engaged in contributing to sustainable development and promoting health and equality for their employees.