A New Model of Sustainable Quality Management in Hotel Companies

Abstract

The travel and hospitality sector represent a cornerstone of global economic activity, significantly influencing financial systems worldwide. Its huge impact on the environment, society and economy has brought it into focus, making it important to achieve sustainability in all its segments, along with excellence and quality. These two concepts have been widely researched separately, but the same cannot be stated for their interrelationship. The goal of this paper is to suggest a new model of sustainable quality management for hotel companies, aiming to identify the most suitable approach for this specific industry. For this purpose, secondary research was conducted aimed at answering the research question: How can the key models of quality and sustainable development be embedded into a framework apt for hotel companies? The authors proposed the model which is derivate from existing models such as Balanced Scorecard (BSC) by Kaplan and Norton which focuses on four perspectives: (a) Learning and growth, finance, customers and internal processes; (b) ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management System and ISO 14001:2015; (c) European Foundation for Quality Management framework and (d) United Nations Sustainable development goals (SDGs). In the future, additional research should be done, in order to see the hotel industry perspective for the proposed model implementation.