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Within hospitality research, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has attracted plenty of interest, but few studies have investigated a strategic approach to CSR management. Strategic CSR assumes that by systematic investment in responsibility that matches customer demand, a business can earn additional profit while fulfilling societal expectations. However, the details of how such systematic management can be achieved are missing. This leaves the business case for customer-focused, strategic CSR largely conceptual, and offers little advice to hospitality managers wishing to pursue such a strategy. To fill these gaps, our study investigated guest willingness to pay for initiatives that were selected based on a model of strategic CSR management that incorporates key aspects of customer behavior. The results provide empirical evidence on how strategic CSR management can contribute to financial performance and support the need for understanding the guest comprehensively during the strategy development process to achieve the gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity and the science that addresses its conservation, loss, and recovery, including conservation biology and restoration ecology, are high on the contemporary global agenda. While the hospitality industry has taken major steps toward net carbon zero and even net positive business, we argue that it has another significant advance to make. The United Nations has dedicated 2021–2030 as the decade of ecosystem restoration, and along with it, several other organizations offer guidance on how businesses should approach the natural environment. Considering the role of hospitality as a consumer of nature, we call for the industry to implement these principles in practice through nature-based solutions and restorative and regenerative hospitality. To strengthen this transformation, we urge hospitality management education to include the basic concepts of ecology, biodiversity, and environmental science, along with their application, in curricula. By doing this, education can advance from presenting sustainability actions as a necessity into illustrating and justifying their need on a planetary scale. The change will facilitate the next step the hospitality industry must take in transforming its relationship with the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customers and society increasingly expect purpose from businesses, and the prevalent corporate social responsibility (CSR) approaches do not adequately respond to this demand. To address the situation, we conceptualize Ethically Meaningful Customer Experiences (EMCE) as a new type of customer-oriented responsibility that synthesizes the experience economy and CSR. EMCEs, unlike previous approaches, circumvent implicit or explicit expectation of sacrifice by transforming it into an ethical activity that customers enjoy. We analyze the differences between earlier approaches and our development and provide emerging industry examples that align with the new concept. In synthesizing ethical consumption and the experience economy, EMCEs contribute a new theoretical path to understanding CSR that builds on the role of experience as a fundamental tourism and hospitality industry element and, consequently, develops an approach endogenous to the industry. The concept also contributes to customer experience design by incorporating ethics as a new experience component. We argue that EMCEs allow hotels and resorts to respond to an emerging customer desire for purpose while also addressing concerns related to the societal role of the tourism and hospitality industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competition between tourism destinations is intensifying, and collaboration between stakeholders can increase destination appeal. Until now, such collaboration has limited itself to governance and marketing. To advance an earlier proposal of destination revenue management (RM), we develop a conceptual framework of instigators and limiters to such cooperation between tourism operators. Next, we synthesize the framework with behavioral game theory (BGT), an extension of classical game theory that challenges the utility maximization-based outcomes of the classical version. BGT incorporates additional aspects, such as reciprocity and fairness, into bargaining and cooperation and supports the feasibility of forming a RM alliance. Based on BGT findings, our synthesis provides theoretical and practical insights into how destinations can improve their competitiveness through cooperation in two important RM areas, pricing and demand creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]