Environmental Management at Small Hotels : A Case study at Bastedalen Herrgård, Sweden

Abstract: A hotel stands for comfort and a high stand of living. This could mean a high per capita consumption of energy, water and other resource, as well as creating a large amount of waste and pollution due to the necessity of having a high standard of hygiene and a high turnover of guests. This thesis is about the hotel environmental management. After surveys of hotels and interviews with hotel managers as to their environmental management, a case study of a small hotel was carried out, namely the Bastedalen Herrgård and Kina Park. The case Bastedalen Herrgård told us that its guests have expressed some requirement to hotel environmental management given the fact that the answer rate was very low. When the guests were asked to provide answers to environmental questions, the dominant answers were positive. But these answers are not necessary leading to the positive behavior. This implies that more in-depth study towards customer’s environmental behavior is needed. It was true in Bastedalen that the hotels owner is playing an important roll in the process toward better environmental management and will decide whether or not to do this and in which direction. It was also true that the hotel owner in this case had not enough resources to follow the example of big hotels. A micro-hotel and other SMEs were obviously in need of financial and technical support to be more “green”. They are also short of relevant information and knowledge.