"Sustainable Business Tourism – Why? How? To What Extent?"

Strategy and Implementation with Focus on Experiences from Practice, Education and Research  

Why?

Sustainability including the economic, the social, and the environmental dimensions, is becoming more and more important for people and companies. For the last decade companies have discovered that being oriented towards sustainability can be an important parameter for image and thereby also for the bottom line. However, it is important that it is done in the right way if it shall be successful. The core element of the conference is dealing with this issue.

The recent United Nations Climate Change conference (COP15) in Copenhagen underlines the importance of the environment in our world today and stresses that actions have to be taken to preserve the environment so future generations will be able to enjoy it as well.

Many new and green initiatives have been undertaken to make the environment an important area of focus for business tourism, but there is still much to do as this field is rather unexplored. Strategy and implementation in tourism and especially in business tourism are areas that have to be researched to a much higher degree.      

How?

The conference welcomes papers that have to do with strategy and implementation for how to deal with the greening process in theory, practice, and papers that can put light on experiences from already initiated investments and processes within this field. It is clear that also more education and research are needed, why papers on education and achievement of green skills within business tourism are welcome. New research on sustainable tourism in relation to business is also welcome.

To what extent?

It is of special interest to look at investigations of the extent to which green investments and green procedures have a positive pay-off concerning investments and running costs of achieving green business tourism. Furthermore, it is interesting to study concrete cases in relation to hotels and their offerings of sustainable business tourism products to customers. Also, transportation issues can be included.