Responsible Tourism in the South African Hotel-subsector

Tourism is currently one of the world's rapidly growing industries. It has also been recognised as a sector which influences the growth of other economic sectors and impacts on the society and environment. 'Responsible Tourism' has therefore become the twenty-first-century buzz phrase within the tourism sub-sectors to promote sustainable tourism development. Locally, the South African tourism industry, led by the then Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT), reflected its interpretation of the global move towards sustainability in the 1996 White Paper on Tourism as Responsible Tourism. This definition emphasised the "people" and "planet" dimensions of sustainability as a way to offset the then predominant focus on "profit". This eventually led to the publication of the South African responsible tourism guidelines by DEAT. National concern among tourism policy makers about effectiveness of the implementation of sustainable business practices in tourism-related organisations motivated the need for a study to examine this issue in the context of hotels in a major tourism destination - Cape Town.