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Numerous events over the last six decades have made it necessary to reformulate the economic development models proposed by capitalism. In this context, sustainability has emerged with the aim of balancing corporate interests with stakeholders' needs. To facilitate this aim, organizations must build a productive management relationship with their stakeholders and thus understand the implications of their operations in all dimensions of sustainability. In this context, due to the potential negative environmental, cultural, and social impacts of tourism, hotels have a responsibility to act in a sustainable manner. Therefore, the objective of this research was to identify criteria against which hotels can measure their impacts. A quali-quantitative study was developed based on the following stages: (1) preparing a workshop that enabled the analysis of 66 possible criteria when designing sustainable hospitality; (2) understanding the degree of importance of each of these criteria based on a semistructured questionnaire applied to 177 professionals linked to the hotel market and academia; and (3) using software R to run a confirmatory factor analysis that validated 39 criteria distributed with regard to the following dimensions: environmental (11), social (10), cultural (4), economic (8), and political (6). We conclude that using these criteria will allow hotel managers to develop more holistic, systemic, integrated, and participatory strategies and to play an active role in building economically profitable, socially just, culturally compatible, and environmentally responsible societies. • Hotel businesses should be protagonists of sustainable tourism development. • Criteria and strategic principles that legitimized sustainable management. • Environmental, sociocultural, economic and political criteria for a sustainable hotel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]