Do Hotels Care? A Proposed Smart Framework for the Effectiveness of an Environmental Management Accounting System Based on Business Intelligence Technologies

Last decades, tourism, which has grown rapidly worldwide, is highly interconnected with environment quality. Specifically, many activities in hospitality industry have adverse impacts on environment. Hotels are customer-oriented organizations, operating within a complex structure aiming to provide services to people that travel for a variety of reasons, i.e., business, leisure, etc. To provide “guest experience” and gain profit, hotels consume a large amount of resources (energy, water, and non-durable products) which result in creating waste of various kinds and influences the environment in many ways. Firstly, the present paper investigates the characteristics of an Environmental Management Accounting system (EMA). It also illustrates the innovative structure of accounting for the environmental costs which are normally hidden into overheads or are totally ignored. More specifically, this research proposes a smart framework that focuses on the Industry 4.0 innovations in order to collect the appropriate data in a hotel setting. Since a large amount of such data emerges from devices connected to the Internet of things (IoT), business intelligence techniques are proposed for big data analytics. Finally, an EMA system is used to transform data into monetary units. Thus, the proposed smart framework comprises a system of measuring environmental costs in both physical units and in monetary terms for hotels sector, implementing Industry 4.0 elements. This framework can be used as an innovative tool for waste management, and the enhancement of sustainability and environmental protection.