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Serviced Accommodation, Environmental Performance and Benchmarks

Abstract The establishment of benchmarks as a tool to aid the evaluation and review of the performance of hospitality and tourism enterprises in a number of areas, e.g., financial appraisal, grading schemes, is comparatively long established. More recently, benchmarks have been developed for the accreditation of business in such areas as TQM and IiP. One area that has been comparatively ignored is that of environmental performance of the enterprises. This is particularly notable, given the rise of attention and debate over sustainable development and the need for a balance between economic growth and the quality of the environment which has generated much debate. The quintessential importance of this latter aspect-the quality of the environment-to the development of tourism has long been recognised, and since the mid-1980s has generated substantial attention to the impact of tourism on the physical environment. In combination, this attention has led to the development of 'sustainability indicators for tourist destinations.' However, there has been a substantial lack of attention to the environmental performance of the enterprises involved and their impacts on the environment-taken in its widest senses. This weakness, and the absence of suitable benchmarks, emerged in the initial stages of a major project designed to evaluate the environmental performance of the tourism sector in the Lake District of England; an area listed in the top 50 of the most attractive tourist destinations in the world in 2000. Thus, the first stage of the project required the development of a set of suitable indicators designed to assess the environmental performance of the enterprises involved. This article discusses the development and derivation of these indicators, with specific focus on serviced accommodation, and subsequently the establishment of a range of benchmarks which may not only be applied in evaluating progress in future assessment of the environmental performance of this sector in the Lake District but also may be applied in other destinations throughout the world.