An overview:
Before I dive into the specification of the Travel and Tourism Sector, let’s talk about my fascination with Corporate Social Responsibility in general. From my perspective, it is not just about giving good impressions. Yes, there is the crucial aspect of CSR that ensures the organisation is behaving ethically, to prevent an undesirable reputation but also, working for a large organisation could offer opportunities to implement ‘good’ in the wider community. This is my primary motivation to expand my CSR knowledge!
(Just a quick disclaimer, as a student I am still on the path to fully understanding CSR and have been somewhat subjective in my approach to this blog. If you are a student you are likely to have access to an academic article which helped inform this post, so I will link it below if you would like to read an expert approach to the topic!) Academic Article: CSR in Tourism and Travel
CSR from a Business perspective verses a PR perspective:
I was recently speaking with a friend of mine discussing the overlaps between studying Business compared to studying Public Relations. He had heard of the Carroll’s model (which is Philanthropic, Ethical, Legal and Economic responsibility), which is totally relevant to a PR perspective of CSR, but our discussion got me thinking about my research into CSR from a real-life perspective.
From a general business perspective, it arguably focuses on sustainable development, whereas the mixture of my focused PR lens and an overly enthusiastic interest in CSR, causes me to view it as a philosophy or ethos of an organisation to create opportunities, for mutual benefit of the organisations, and their internal and external stakeholders. For instance, having consistent values the internal stakeholders are ACTUALLY invested in. It is also incumbent on all internal stakeholders, including yourself (if you are in the industry), to be aware of the range of impacts your actions have and adjusting your behaviour accordingly to be more responsible.
(New York: bucket list destination, which I visited for the first time right before the first lockdown!)
CSR in The Tourism and Travel Sector:
If you can’t tell I got very engrossed in my research and I realised that the term CSR can be approached in a vast variety of ways and there is so many different interpretations. Strangely I found that the domain ‘environment’ does not feature in the label ‘CSR’ rather the domain ‘social’. Which is surprising in an era when it is arguably the most important issue, especially regarding Travel and Tourism.
Environmental threats in travel and tourism are somewhat obvious. There is a need to consider the multiple forms of transport and impacts on the environment such as, carbon footprint. However, CSR in my opinion should be considered as multi-faceted and cover all types of responsibility.
Since the dramatic implications caused by the global pandemic, there is also concern for jobs in this sector. To give one of many examples, British airways want to make significant staff cuts; 12,000 job roles. They have demonstrated in my opinion a lack of CSR, as BA staff spoke out about feeling they were forced to take redundancy. I can luckily learn from the mistakes of some case studies!
I hope this provided an insight to my perspective on CSR and why I’m so interested to learn more about it! If you’d like to follow along with what I’m learning and perhaps learn more with me, please subscribe to my blog!
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