Disseminating environmental ethics and values: a study of ecotourism business owners

Purpose: Establishing a shared understanding of the environment and sustainable development between stakeholders should be fundamental to the raison d'être of ecotourism businesses. Indeed, many will begin ecotourism businesses with the objective of sharing their own personal environmental ethics and values with their customers through the tourism experience. Yet it is not always the business owner that interacts with the customer, the organisations’ employees will also interact with the guest and are thus responsible for communicating the environmental ethics and values that underpin the business. The purpose of this paper is to explore how ecotourism business owners ensure that their employees convey their environmental ethics and values to their customers. So how do ecotourism business owners ensure that employees convey their environmental ethics and values to their customers? Design/methodology/approach: This paper reports on the findings of interviews with 18 eco-tourism business owners in Australia who sought to examine their strategies for disseminating environmental ethics and values with the organisation’s employees. Findings: It was found that strategic recruitment to attract like-minded employees was important which was reinforced through education, training and mentoring to develop an organisational culture underpinned by shared values and responsibility. Originality/value: This study has contributed to the growing body of literature focused on the supply side of ecotourism businesses. It has addressed a gap in our understanding by specifically investigating the strategies that ecotourism business owners adopt to disseminate their personal environmental ethics and values to their employees