Sustainability information from Swedish tourism companies - what, where and for whom?

Purpose: Within the tourism industry, there is a considerable focus on sustainable tourism. One way for tourismservice providers to address these issues and present their sustainability work is through annual reports,sustainability reports and homepages. Sustainability report is a way for tourism companies to be more legitimateand accountable toward their stakeholders. The research objective, with this study, was to investigate and analyzeSwedish tourism service providers’ sustainability information. What kind of sustainability information ispresented? Where is the sustainability information presented and for whom? Design/methodology/approach: The data for this study was collected mainly during December 2015-February2016. The research design was constructed as a qualitative explorative study on tourism companies and how theypresent their work with sustainability (economic, social and environmental) for their stakeholders. Data wascollected from 50 different tourism companies in Sweden from their annual reports, sustainability reports and theirhome pages. They are large-sized tourism companies with a yearly turnover between 5-50 million euros. Findings: The result shows that what they present is often focused on social or environmental sustainability (notboth dimensions). The tourism service providers are all presenting economic sustainability since they must do anannual report yearly. Another conclusion is that they do not use sustainability report as their communicationchannel to show accountability and legitimacy to their stakeholders. Home pages are used mostly for presentingtheir sustainability work despite that there are large differences between how much information from thecompanies. The stakeholders seem to be mainly the customers. Research/practical implications: It still seems like that many tourism companies do not see the benefits insustainable tourism. If tourism companies want to be legitimate and accountable concerning sustainability theyhave the possibility to present more information about their sustainable information to stakeholders and conducteven more efforts on sustainability issues in their everyday business life. It would be interesting to make interviewsto gain more insight in what they want to communicate to their stakeholders concerning their sustainability work.It would also be interesting to compare with other countries and culture concerning tourist companies’sustainability work and their communication to stakeholders. Originality/value: The main value of this paper is that the study focuses on large sized tourism companies thatmust present a sustainability report from 2017. The European Union has decided to make it mandatory for largesized companies to present sustainability reports in 2017 and this study is therefore interesting since it shows theirsustainability work before this law is implemented