Ko Koens

Sustainable value creation depends not only on the internal organisation of businesses, but also on their relations with others in the wider international supply chain. With increasing levels of outsourcing, businesses are now only as sustainable as their suppliers (Sönnichsen & Clement, 2020). This is recognized within the manufacturing industry and is equally true for service-oriented industries like hospitality and tourism. Integrating sustainability into purchasing and supply management has long received limited attention from hospitality and tourism stakeholders, however (Galeazzo et al., 2021). The academic literature also reflects this, with little focus on achieving sustainable development within purchasing and supply chain management in the hospitality industry Some even argue that “there is a clear dearth in existing research” (Al-Aomar & Hussain, 2017: 42; Gruchmann et al., 2022).

Global developments and intractable challenges necessitate deeper and more impactful stakeholder engagement at the rural destination level, as made clear by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on tourism ecosystems. This chapter proposes the living lab model as a way to increase stakeholder participation, using a case study from a living lab (LL) based in the Netherlands. Detailing living lab activities aligned with and part of the EU-funded SmartCulTour project, the case shares findings on the value of the LL to stimulate local capacity for decision-making and activate participation across a quadruple-helix ecosystem. This chapter offers high-level recommendations for operationalising the LL in the sustainable tourism domain, based on use of the LL as a platform for opening up a dialogue on the future of the development of a coastal destination in the Rotterdam metropolitan region.

Businesses have a crucial role to play in addressing societal challenges, including that of climate change. Facilitating the important role of these actors is one of the cornerstones of developing Conscious Destinations. Theory on transition and regenerative business has been fruitful in demonstrating the societal shifts we must engage in to tackle climate change, but are limited in their application to business practice. Conversely, traditional business models provide little to no room to consider the positioning of a business within its socio-ecological system or to acknowledge impact beyond the walls of the organisation. By leveraging the notion of ‘business purpose’ and the embeddedness of an organisation in the wider socio-ecological system, the Business Purpose Canvas is a tool that enables organisational stakeholders to evaluate current business practices and identify opportunities to redesign business and business models in ways that foster regenerative business practice in nature-based tourism.

Amsterdam is one of many cities that has struggled with problems of overtourism in recent years. These problems include nuisance, crowdedness, rising housing prices and economic dependence on tourism. City administrators were aware of these issues and took a variety of measures before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as placing restrictions on tourism rental (Airbnb) and setting up campaigns to tackle problem behaviour of tourists. Yet when COVID-19 halted the stream of tourists visiting Amsterdam, this created a unique opportunity to make more drastic changes, which the administration has addressed by proposing a new series of measures to proactively help contain tourism regrowth in the post-pandemic period. In this article we critically analyze these strategies to ascertain the extent to which they appear able to address the various issues of pre-pandemic overtourism to which they are aimed. Our analysis demonstrate that while trajectories already started before the pandemic are now being augmented and given more priority and some new strategies to further curb tourism growth are also being implemented, overall Amsterdam remains dominated by a growth-oriented approach to tourism planning.

This paper seeks to highlight underlying issues of the tourism system that have led to tourism extremes of too much or too little tourism. Five phases are recognized that reflect different ways of dealing with too much tourism over time, after which the impact of a sudden lack of tourism is investigated in light of future renewal processes. This discussion highlights the remarkable capacity of the tourism industry to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances and crises, even when these cause anguish to individuals and within societies at large. The paper thus seeks to contextualize the current discussions regarding the transformation of tourism post COVID-19. It highlights the complexity of changing a tourism that multiple stakeholders depend on or have grown accustomed to. To come to a more balanced tourism, it is necessary to not only come up with alternative visions and strategies, but also to engage with the political economy nature of tourism development. A future research agenda should therefore also discuss facets of entangled power, social exclusion, inequalities and class differences to come to new reference points of what actually constitutes a more inclusive tourism success.

This paper examines how a serious game approach could support a participatory planning process by bringing stakeholders together to discuss interventions that assist the development of sustainable urban tourism. A serious policy game was designed and played in six European cities by a total of 73 participants, reflecting a diverse array of tourism stakeholders. By observing in-game experiences, a pre- and post -game survey and short interviews six months after playing the game, the process and impact of the game was investigated. While it proved difficult to evaluate the value of a serious game approach, results demonstrate that enacting real-life policymaking in a serious game setting can enable stakeholders to come together, and become more aware of the issues and complexities involved with urban tourism planning. This suggests a serious game can be used to stimulate the uptake of academic insights in a playful manner. However, it should be remembered that a game is a tool and does not, in itself, lead to inclusive participatory policymaking and more sustainable urban tourism planning. Consequently, care needs to be taken to ensure inclusiveness and prevent marginalization or disempowerment both within game-design and the political formation of a wider participatory planning approach.

Tourism growth, particularly in cities, is coming under increased scrutiny. However, even often visited cities appear to find it difficult to agree upon a strategy to limit tourism growth. The current paper investigates this issue by looking at the extent to which different stakeholders’ perspectives on tourism development align. Q-sort methodology is employed to find the main worldviews and the extent to which they are shared by stakeholders in similar roles (e.g. policymakers, industry, resident). Results point to the existence of five different worldviews, which differ in the extent to which tourism growth is desirable or problematic and whether resident participation is advantageous or counterproductive. Stakeholders have highly different worldviews, even those with similar roles, which may help explain the difficulty to change the tourism growth paradigm as they limit opportunities for generating new consensus-based collective solutions. If we accept that tourism development strategies are driven and informed at least in part by individual worldviews, it may be impossible to make ‘objective’ policy choices. Instead, it might be more useful to explore possibilities to allow stakeholders to express their worldviews to better understand what sustainable tourism development entails for different people at different places and moments in time.

The journal Sustainability has previously published special issues on sustainable tourism and on sustainable cities (both in 2014). This special issue presents recent insights from combining the two research topics. There is some convergence with respect to core challenges that sustainable urban tourism is facing. Firstly, relating to social sustainable development, there is the tension between the quality of life for residents in different ways and the development of cities to benefit the tourism industry. Secondly, relating to environmental sustainable development, there is the tension between residents and their desire for good local environmental standards and visiting tourists that create a number of over-tourism related local environmental problems. Thirdly, there are the challenges that so far have received less attention, but obviously are expected to become crucial in the years to come: The double climate change provides risks to cities from a changing climate and from more ambitious climate policies to come.