CYR: Sustainability in Tourism

How can we embed sustainability within the tourism industry? Many tourism firms already have environmental or social initiatives that give back to the community or environment on which their operations rely. However, our understanding of these initiatives and whether they create tensions within the business models remains underexplored. Paradox theory offers a unique lens through which tensions in sustainability can be investigated and may offer insights into strategies for managing consumer perception of tensions in sustainability.

In this presentation, I outline where I am locating my research in sustainable tourism research. I then summarize my literature review and introduce my conceptual model, which theorizes how using multiple sustainability approaches simultaneously within a business model may result in tensions, pulling the business model in different directions. I conclude by outlining my proposed research and contributions.