Sustainable environmental practices within the hotel sector of Malawi

Abstract: The Malawian hotel sector has over the past two decades registered tremendous growth due to the higher demand for overnight accommodation and business meetings. Despite indicators that the hotel sector is growing rapidly, impacts that such growth may have on the environmental has been generally ignored. There is a need for the hotel sector to embrace sustainable environmental practices to ensure adequate environmental protection and also attract tourist to more sustainable destinations. With a global competitive business environment, hotels must make an attempt to attract consumers (especially from the developed world) that are becoming more conscious about their environmental impacts and the consumer assessment of the impacts. Hotels that value reputation can then no longer afford to be complacent about sustainable environmental practices. Malawi local hotels have also seen competition from foreign hotels investing in the country. These foreign hotels have been promoting sustainable environmental practices in their establishments threatening tourist’s revenue for local hotels by attracting guests that generally prefer to stay in hotels practicing sustainable environmental practices. There is therefore a need to examine sustainable environmental practices within the Malawian hotel sector, what the possible challenges may be to advance sustainable environmental practices and how the local hotel sector can implement such practices to remain competitive. The study therefore aims to determine how Malawian hotels and international hotels generally promote and implement sustainable environmental practices, to establish how national and local government regulate and enforce such practices within hotels and through case examples, the study compares an international hotel (Sogecoa Golden Peacock Hotel) and a national hotel (Sunbird Mount Soche Hotel) to explore how these institutions implement sustainable environmental practices. The study uses a qualitative methodology and semi-structured interviews to secure the perceptions of key informants (i.e. national and local government officials, hotel employees and managers and an NGO dealing directly with various sectors of the tourism industry). A Grounded Theory approach was used to formulate themes. Ten themes emanated from the research findings out of which five major interrelated themes (governance, leadership, responsiveness, collaboration and capacity) are reported on...M.A. (Tourism and Hospitality Management