Accounting for local economic benefit in tourism accommodation: a lean methodology for property-level reporting

This article contributes to sustainable tourism impact measurement by developing and illustrating a lean local economic benefit accounting methodology for accommodation enterprises. Drawing on three cases, the article shows how routine financial accounts can be reclassified to make local wages, procurement, community payments, accommodation overflow and other locally retained flows visible. The method does not claim to measure full economic impact, net additionality or multiplier effects. Rather, it provides a transparent lower-bound account of enterprise-mediated local value that can support management decisions about procurement, supplier development and local embeddedness. The cases show that the accounting logic applies across remote, refurbishment and annual-reporting contexts, but also that further standardization is needed before the method can support benchmarking across properties.