Sustainability Management for Tourism Micro Businesses

“If I’m a one-person business, do I still need a sustainability management system?”
 
“I don’t have large teams to manage. Are any of these management tools relevant?”

“It feels really cumbersome to document and report on things when I’m really the only one responsible for my business at the end of the day.”

Legal compliance, due diligence, stakeholder management, materiality assessment… With such a long list of jargons, sustainability management can sometimes feel like “it’s just for very large corporations.”  

So does any of this matter to Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) in travel and tourism? Our industry is full of family-owned companies, solo entrepreneurs, and micro businesses. What does sustainability management mean for very small tourism businesses, and how is it relevant to them?

Improve efficiency in your internal management processes

As we often hear, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” And one of the key first steps in measuring (and managing) your sustainability efforts is to start documenting what you do. And having a system in place will help you improve how you document things.

Even if you don’t immediately need all your data for anything other than your own record-keeping purposes, having a consistent way of organizing your processes and methods will be helpful when your business grows. So you can think of your management system as a way to future proof your business.

For example, you will be more efficient in onboarding new partners, staff members, and suppliers in the future, as you will have a more streamlined way of organizing your management steps. This, over time, can also help you save time, even though you will need some time investment up-front to become more organized.

Similarly, regardless of where your business currently is in your sustainability journey, you may consider pursuing a sustainability certification or an award in the future. Having well-organized and consistent records of your sustainability efforts will be very helpful for your application process.  

Improve your relationship with key business partners

As a small or very small business, you likely do not face extensive reporting requirements, compared to larger corporations that are facing complex requirements such as climate-related financial disclosures, and supply chain-related human rights and environmental impact due diligence.

However, even if the current and ongoing sustainability-related regulatory developments - such as the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) - do not have immediate direct impact on your business, it’s important to keep in mind that travel and tourism SMMEs operate within the context of local and global value chains, with countless interconnected parts.

If you are a local tour service provider working with inbound operators, your international partners may have requirements for supplier selection reflecting their own climate and sustainability commitments. If you are a small accommodation provider, the online booking platforms where your property is listed may have requirements for sustainability data to assist clients seeking more sustainable travel options.

All these are important reasons for travel and tourism SMMEs to start implementing systematic approaches to measuring and monitoring relevant aspects of their sustainability efforts.

"Suitable to its Size and Scope"

Having a systematic approach to sustainability management is useful and relevant to all tourism organizations, regardless of their type, size or scope. But, understandably, there is a significant difference in how to make such an approach work for a large company as opposed to a micro business.

For a large company with many departments and teams, it's important to have a robust system for measuring, monitoring and reporting on different aspects of their operations, so that they can manage sustainability efforts in an organized and efficient manner. This should also be supported by a strong structural set up, including dedicated roles and responsibilities and well-defined reporting requirements.

For micro-businesses, a "management system" may simply mean having an organized way of documenting different aspects of your efforts. And implementing such a system should not be an overwhelmingly time-consuming commitment (if it were it would not be sustainable).

It’s important to keep in mind that standards and guidelines are meant to be used as tools to support our efforts, applied according to the specific context in which each of us operates in. Without that, a standard is just a bunch of words.

Making sustainability an integral part of your business

It's important to think of a "sustainability management system" NOT as something that is really complicated that you need to set up from scratch. The most useful kind of sustainability management system is one that is incorporated into the existing structure of your organization, working with the processes and mechanisms you already have in place.

(A very simple example: if your organization already has some kind of regular reporting process in place, use that to incorporate sustainability related information, rather than developing a separate new process for measuring and reporting just on sustainability.)

Securing time is challenging for many businesses (large and small), so to ensure a successful implementation of sustainability management, we should seek to use what we have and make sustainability a part of it, rather than seeing sustainability as a separate category of business priorities to be handled.

Lastly, remember that "setting up a system" does not need to mean you set everything perfectly from the start. It's a process that we can always adjust and update as we move forward. So for example, you could start with a situational analysis to identify your most important impact areas (if you were to focus on one area of your business to improve, what would have the most significant impact in terms of your sustainability objectives and outcomes?) and build a policy around that to start with.