Being Responsible: Hotels

I have a theory that the "management industry" (consultants, academics-turned-pop-management authors, so-called gurus) took the alphabet and assigned to each letter a particular buzzword. Rather than begin with ABC, they didn't instead opt for doh-ray-me but preferred to start by minding their P's and Q's. P was people. Q was quality. R was responsibility. S, sustainability, and so on, until the P's and Q's came round again and they could invent some other spurious concept which they could flog to gullible managements.

All these buzzwords have an obverse or an outcome opposite to the one intended, which in management marketing terms would be far more interesting, entertaining and probably truthful. Our people are useless. Our quality is lousy. We have adopted unsustainable polices. We are totally and utterly irresponsible.

I realise I have these last two in the wrong order, but that's because responsibility is the theme of the day, as it has been the theme for many a long year in business. Given the length of time that responsibility is meant to have been the subject of vast tomes quietly gathering dust on a senior manager's bookshelf, it seems slightly strange that it should only now be the subject of a study in the local hotel industry. But we have to thank the director and a researcher at the Chair for Corporate Social Responsibility at the Nebrija University (in association with Santander Bank) for having brought our attention to the subject.

The study isn't totally to do with the local industry, as in the hotel industry in the Balearics, as it covers hotel groups elsewhere, but given the importance of the industry in the Balearics and the fact that many of Spain's hotel chains are from the Balearics, then it is pretty local. 

I'm assuming that most of you will not be rushing out to get hold of a copy of this report and transport it to the beach with you for a bit of light reading, so I shall help you out. If you happen to be staying in a Meliá or an NH hotel (NH is not a Balearics-based group and has a mere four hotels in the Balearics), then you will be delighted to know that these hotels are operated by companies which are highly responsible. They meet six out of seven determinants of responsibility, as defined by the authors. If, on the other hand, you are at a Marriott AC hotel or one operated by Majestic/Mar, Marina, Sirenis, THB or Valentin, then I'm afraid the level of responsibility is only one out of seven.

So, does this mean that these hotel groups are not socially responsible? Of course it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything of the sort.

The seven determinants are basically all to do with corporate ethics and the environment. It's all very noble and worthy stuff, but stuff which also requires a good deal of time and resources to be devoted towards compliance, and in turn this usually requires handing over sizable amounts of corporate cash to consultants who will come in and ensure the compliance. The management industry has spawned its own sub-industry, one which has made a very good living, thanks very much, out of the management industry's alphabeticisation of business affairs. Just because a hotel chain doesn't have some quality mark or produce some particular report doesn't make it less than responsible.

Managerialist fascism has required of businesses that they fall into line in signing up to ISO standards or what have you. But the piece of paper they might receive at the end of the compliance process means virtually nothing to the people who really matter - the end punter, the tourist, the guest. Does anyone seriously make a decision on where to stay based upon whether a hotel chain has a carbon disclosure project?

Well of course one tour operator which has maintained that the punter does is TUI, and it bangs on endlessly about its own responsible behaviour. It is odd, therefore, that two hotel chains with which TUI is intimately associated through ownership, RIU and Grupotel, only meet four out of the seven determinants, say the authors. They don't have the ISO standard for environmental management. But as I say, it doesn't really make much difference if they do or they don't, and quite probably they both exceed the demands of the standard, as this is one of its main criticisms; it requires only so much.

Whatever the meeting of various environmental or ethical standards there may be, there is one further aspect of corporate social responsibility - the economic one. Hotels chains generate employment and they generate wealth, but they also take both away. Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. First you begin with A ... All-inclusive.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.