Corporate Responsibility as Essential to Sustainable Tourism Yield Larry Dwyer, Leo Jago, Marg Deery and Liz Fredline

Aims of Paper To discuss the link between the development of indicators of tourism ‘yield’ and the development of indicators for TBL reporting to highlight the results of the authors’ attempts to develop financial, social and environmental measures of tourism yield. to discuss the challenges faced in converting these independent measures into an overall measure or index of ‘sustainable yield’ consistent with TBL reporting.

TBL Reporting and Tourism Yield A TBL is not a quest for a new bottom line metric but rather an approach to management and performance assessment that stresses the importance and interdependence of economic, environmental, and social performance. TBL is an “emerging value creation concept,” based on a recognition that for a company to prosper over the long term, it must continuously meet society’s needs for goods and services without destroying natural or social capital

The measurement problem A problem that bedevils TBL reporting is the difficulty of measurement of social and environmental effects of business operations There is presently no accepted single standard for measuring the combined economic, environmental, and social performance of an organization. Some commentators argue that this is an unachievable aim

Sustainable Yield Different types of tourists spend different amounts of money within a destination buy different types of goods and services undertake different patterns of activities. They will thus have different types and levels of economic, social and environmental impact The notion of ‘Sustainable yield’ seeks to incorporate all of these impacts in one measure

Sustainable Yield On a broader view, the notion of ‘yield’ includes environmental and social value in addition to economic value In the context of sustainable development, it is impossible to consider the economic dimension in isolation from the social or environmental and vice versa This implies a re-examination of the notion of ‘yield’ and its implications for tourism firms

Sustainable Yield Each inbound market segment incurs economic, social an environmental costs as a result of the services utilised during their stay. These costs, or footprints, vary across market segments depending on the mix of services utilised Incorporates social and environmental dimensions with economic measures Difficulties in measuring social and environmental ‘footprints’ of tourists CRC is currently developing measures of sustainable yield with reference to TBL literature

Expenditure and Financial Yield associated with Special Inbound Tourism Markets

GOS as proportion of expenditure by Niche market

Real GOS per visitor night by Niche market

GOS per visitor trip and per visitor night by Niche market

Social and Environmental Yield The impacts that particular groups of tourists have on their hosts and the natural environment depends on the interactions between four sets of variables. The characteristics of the tourists (including the volume and pattern of their spending) The characteristics of the tourism activity (what tourists do) The characteristics of the destination (its physical and social fabric) Destination Management Practices (tourism planning, policy, regulations)

Measuring Social Yield Australia’s International Visitor Survey publishes data on the types of activities undertaken by inbound visitors by country of origin and by travel motivation (holiday, VFR, Business etc). The market segments also include the niche markets identified above.

Towards a measurement of social yield; 5 Steps profiling destinations based on their characteristics (eg. stage of tourism development, tourist/resident ratio, remoteness, number of industrial bases, seasonality, cultural vulnerability, environmental vulnerability, level of resident support for tourism) identifying the characteristics which define the key market segments of tourists attracted to each destination (eg. origin, age, travel motive, first or repeat visit, travel party, type of accommodation, transport used identifying the types of activities that each market segment undertakes identifying the social impacts associated with various activities and travel behaviours valuing the impacts

5 Steps The first three steps are relatively straightforward and depend on data availability The authors have undertaken some preliminary work in respect of each of these steps Regarding step four, there is little to no empirically tested evidence of the link between various activities (and other travel behaviours) and a measure of social impact. This empirical testing must be undertaken to advance the development of social yield measures.

matrix of a range of activities and a range of social impacts

Measuring Social Yield The matrix could be completed through a survey, perhaps using a Delphi technique, with a small expert sample of tourism stakeholders in the destination under examination. Preliminary secondary data analysis would be used to identify the key market segments and their dominant activities and travel behaviours. The expert panel could then rate the social impact of each group in terms of each specific impact.

Measuring Environmental Yield a hybrid input-output approach was used to takes into account direct impacts of tourist accommodations and indirect impacts caused by the consumption of goods and services Thus the approach covers so-called audit-type ‘on-site’ impacts as well as ‘off-site’ impacts of the entire supply chain. The relevant environmental impacts include those on energy use, water use, greenhouse gas emissions and (in aggregate) ‘ecological footprint’.

Energy Use per trip

Energy Use per day

Rankings of niche markets, selected economic and environmental yield measures

Conclusions The measures developed in this paper help towards operationalising the notion of ‘sustainable yield’ at the operator level. They also are capable of providing guidance to firms as to what markets they should target in order to promote ‘sustainable’ tourism development.

Conclusions At this time, no method has been developed for ‘merging’ these impacts into a single measure of sustainability there are particular problems of converting social impacts into dollar amounts the measures are valuable in allowing tourism operators to better understand the ‘trade- offs’ that may need to be made in tourism development and marketing activity .

Conclusions The results can help to develop strategies to achieve highest sustainable yield. Achieving long term sustainable and profitable tourism products would secure a competitive advantage for any tourist destination with benefits to all tourism stakeholders. The approach can improve the capacity for management decision making by tourism stakeholders to promote ‘high yield’ sustainable tourism that enhances competitiveness in the tourism industry.