Linking the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with Hotel Classification Systems: A Conceptual Framework

Sustainability is emerging as a fundamental requirement for the businesses to remain economically viable and in context of tourism businesses, there is a need of assessment of its sustainability practices. In this regard, integrating SDGs into hotel classification systems is being identified as a positive step towards the sustainability in the industry. There is already evidence of incorporating the sustainability measures in the hotel classification systems, for example the “Hotelstars Union” classification system of EU. However, despite being of tremendous significance, sustainability is optional rather than mandatory. Therefore, there is a need for a conceptual framework linking SDG indicators and hotel classification criteria, to provide a holistic and comparable assessment of hotel sustainability. This study analyses ten major hotel classification systems of the world to identify how such systems are addressing different SDGs using ordinal scaling approach along with signaling theory and legitimacy theory. The analysis show that SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) is a global baseline across all systems. While SDGs 6 and 7 feature in government-led frameworks, the SDG 5 (Gender Equality) remains consistently neglected. Only five out of ten systems achieve a ‘substantive’ typology, while the remaining five exhibit transitional or symbolic patterns of SDG alignment, often reflecting governance structures without measurement. This study contributes to proposing the framework that makes sustainability criteria obligatory in classification systems that can be tracked in real-time for continuous improvement.