Open AccessSustainability, Competitive Advantages and Performance in the Hotel Industry: A Synergistic Relationship
Author(s) -
Jorge PereiraMoliner,
María D. LópezGamero,
Xavier Font,
José F. MolinaAzorín,
Juan José Tarı́,
Eva M. PertusaOrtega
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of tourism and services
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1804-5650
DOI - 10.29036/jots.v12i23.282
Subject(s) - sustainability , competitive advantage , revenue , tourism , ordinary least squares , structural equation modeling , business , hospitality industry , environmental economics , marketing , industrial organization , economics , econometrics , accounting , mathematics , ecology , statistics , geography , archaeology , biology
The relationship between sustainability, competitive advantages, and performance is a topic with no conclusive results in the tourism industry. To contribute to the debate, the purpose of this study is i) to analyze the influence of sustainability on cost and differentiation competitive advantages and ii) to examine the possible synergistic relationship between sustainability and performance. Perceptual as well as hotel-specific objective performance measurements are used, such as occupancy rate, average daily rate (ADR), and revenues per available room (RevPAR), to examine all the relationships. Structural equation models based on Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) are applied to test all the hypotheses. Data is collected from 3-, 4- and 5-star hotels in Spain. The results show that sustainability positively and significantly influences cost and differentiation advantages, perceptual performance, ADR, and RevPAR. In addition, those hotels with these three performance variables whose values are above the median obtain a significant relationship between sustainability and performance. Consequently, there is evidence of a synergistic sustainability-performance relationship in the hotel industry. Therefore, this study offers academic evidence on the strong relationships that exist between these variables in the hotel industry. This research work analyses all three sustainability pillars (economic, environmental, and social sustainability), and the practices that best explain each of the three sustainability pillars are indicated so that hotel managers can optimize their sustainable management.