Title: Sustainable tourism among Swedish tourism service providers - easy to say but difficult to implement

Authors: Anna Sörensson; Yvonne Von Friedrichs

Addresses: Department of Business, Economics and Law, Mid Sweden University, 831 25 Östersund, Sweden ' Department of Business, Economics and Law, Mid Sweden University, 831 25 Östersund, Sweden

Abstract: The research objective of this study was to investigate and analyse how Swedish tourism service providers present their work with sustainability. Data was collected from 48 randomly selected tourism service providers in Sweden, ranging from micro and small to medium-sized tourism service providers. The 48 different tourism service providers also offer different types of tourism services (e.g. tourist agency, stay, do and travel). The results show that the issues of sustainable tourism are present but that the scope is fairly small; focus is mainly on economic sustainability. There are some micro tourism service providers that are strongly focused on all three dimensions of sustainably, often offering some kind of nature-based tourism attraction. The medium-sized and small tourism service providers address the issues of environmental sustainability but in reality there is little action; sustainable tourism is more of a buzzword for the Swedish tourism service providers than concrete action.

Keywords: sustainable tourism; tourism service providers; Sweden; environmental sustainability; economic sustainability; social sustainability; nature-based tourism.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2016.078700

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2016 Vol.29 No.2, pp.309 - 321

Received: 30 Jan 2015
Accepted: 24 Sep 2015
Published online: 01 Sep 2016 *

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