A methodology to assess the overall environmental pressure attributed to tourism areas: A combined approach for typical all-sized hotels in Chalkidiki, Greece

The present study aims to promote a methodological scheme to combine the main environmental pressures that can be attributed to tourism activity in order to characterize environmental sustainability for a defined area of concentrated tourism (DACT). The methodological framework is demonstrated in the prevalent tourism destination of Northern Greece, Chalkidiki. The approach puts forward the tourism environmental composite indicator (TECI) which is analytically defined, mathematically formulated and finally implemented for the case under study. TECI provides the basis for a comparative analysis for typical all-sized hotel categories in terms of their combined environmental pressure. Apart from energy and water consumption and waste generation, the presented scheme establishes links with life cycle assessment (LCA) in order to include estimations of carbon footprint (CO2-eq) for hotels' accommodation and transport, embedded in the TECI concept. A questionnaire for hoteliers was designed for the above purposes, and was used as input, among other data, to the overall methodological approach. The hotel managers gave their feedback via a face-to-face interview. Different normalized key performance indicators, i.e., pressure per m2, pressure per room, pressure per guest night are combined in one single composite indicator. The relative significance of each environmental pressure considered is realized by embedding weighting factors in the TECI mathematical formulation. To demonstrate the methodology TECI provides a comparative analysis for typical all-sized hotel categories in Chalkidiki and concludes with characterizing the level of the environmental sustainability as very poor. The results provide a rich insight into the trade-offs/synergies between the main environmental pressures that can be attributed to tourism activity. The work presented adds up to the low number of respective implementations found in the literature, especially by combining the theoretical background of environmental indicators with LCA. Last but not least, the identification of environmental degradation “hot spots” is realized in order to provide insights for sustainable tourism practices to stakeholders of the tourism industry and highlight insights for strategic governance and policy modeling for the area under consideration.