Hotel sustainability practices

PurposeThe tourism industry is facing challenges in implementing sustainability into business.Preserving environmental resources, having a positive impact on the social values of the community, and at the same time bringing out favorable economic benefits are foremost challenges. (1)The accommodation sector, which is comprised of small and medium sized entities, in particular, is a significant source of CO 2 emissions, and a heavy-user of energy and water. (2)In past decades, many world hotel chains notably have been making efforts to become greener, and some research has revealed that tourists nowadays are increasingly choosing green hotels during their travels. (3)ccordingly, sustainable certifications and actions are now being considered as key service quality dimensions that influence guests' satisfaction. (4) The observation of this global sustainability trend of the accommodation sector has prompted research questions.How is the situation in Japan?Is sustainability practice progressing in Japanese accommodation, where there are so many small and medium-sized ryokan and inns?In order to investigate the situation in Japan in comparison with the international trend, this review is written on the topic of hotel sustainability efforts and strategies.Identifying and examining existing research both within and outside the Japanese context and comparing them would be beneficial for facilitating the smooth and accelerated advancement of sustainability efforts in Japan. Search procedureThis investigation began with a literature search on Scien-ceDirect, an online database of scientific articles, one of the important search engines for the academic world.First, the keywords "sustainability AND hotel" were used to identify potential sources, and a total of 49,167 articles were found.In order to narrow down the references to be more relevant, the title search using keywords "intitle: sustainability AND intitle: hotel" was conducted.The result was 59 English articles with both keywords in each title published between 1990 and 2025.A search for Japanese articles was conducted with CiNii, a major online database of Japanese academic articles in Japan.The same procedure was taken with the search for English articles.First, a meta-search with the keywords "sustainability AND hotel (in Japanese words)" was conducted, which brought up only 7 articles since 1990.Then, the advanced-search limiting these two intitle words narrowed down the number to 2 articles.Suspecting that Japanese people may be more familiar with the word SDGs rather than sustainability, an additional Union