As for any other business, our collective challenge to realize sustainable development requires hotels to incorporate the principles of sustainability in their operations and to simultaneously create economic, social and environmental value. Although hotels are increasingly engaged with specific aspects of sustainability, many if not most hospitality professionals still seem to assume that guests are predominantly driven by hedonic and gain motives, view sustainable measures as a threat to their hospitality experience, and are therefore not willing to accept more progressive sustainability measures. This article explores whether this assumption is correct and whether guests are willing and able to focus on sustainability related (normative) values during their stay in a hotel, and thus accept an adjustment to the current host-guest relationship in hotels. By reviewing relevant literature and analysing the results of interviews with hotel guests, this article concludes that as far as the guest is concerned, the host-guest relationship within hotels need not be limited to a purely economic transaction but actually offers room for an open and informed discussion between host and guest on ways to transform this relationship to one that actually supports sustainable development of the hotel sector and wider society. This conclusion will hopefully inform a more mature approach by hotels to the integration of sustainability in their strategy and operations, and a more unreserved and collaborative dialogue with guests about current and future sustainability measures.
Isabel Löfgren takes us to the Stockholm high-rise suburbs to show us how art projects and transnational media intermingle with the multicultural urban reality. In this book, she discusses the architecture of her project Satellitstaden, where her artistic interventions with the satellite dishes on façades highlight the voices of its inhabitants through participatory and co-generative artistic processes. In these peripheries, satellite subjects emerge, orbiting around multiple identifications, foregrounding the notion of spatial justice, the subaltern and the importance of grassroots movements.The book outlines a philosophy of hospitality in response to the turn in Europe against refugees, which Löfgren considers to be a crisis of hospitality, not a crisis of migration. Löfgren discusses the ethics that govern the relationship between guest and host, the self and Other. Who has the right to belong? On what terms? She argues for a hospitable turn in art, urban planning and media, in which guest-host relationships are performed, mediated and problematized.We urgently need to re-imagine the ethics of hospitality and habitability for the near future. The 2020 pandemic forces us to reassess our philosophy and practice of human contact, re-engineering how we relate to the Other, and what hospitality means in the face of a global halt.Isabel Löfgren is a Swedish-Brazilian artist, researcher and educator based in Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro. She is currently working at the Media and Communication Studies Department at Södertörn University in Sweden, next to her artistic practice. Her research interests include cultural politics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of diaspora in the fields of contemporary art, media philosophy, and media activism.
MULTIFILE
Subjective well-being in host-guest relations has only been considered from the viewpoint of the guest. This study addresses the host perspective and assesses the association between perceived tourism impacts and residents' subjective well-being in a mass tourism destination. Findings indicate that perceived tourism impacts are associated with life satisfaction, the cognitive component, and not with hedonic level of affect, the affective component. The life domains of health, interpersonal relationships, friends, and services and infrastructure, in particular, are positively affected.
LINK
