What is Corporate Environmental Responsibility (CER)

Tourism promotes the interaction of visitors with destination places and their communities, resulting in a set of impacts for the local population. Although traditionally no major environmental damage due to tourism in general, and hospitality, in particular, has been recognized, as the concept of sustainability develops, its negative impacts are becoming evident. As the hotel sector is one of the most important components of the tourism offer, minimizing its environmental impacts plays a fundamental role in the sustainability of tourist destinations. Since Algarve is one of the top 20 travel destinations worldwide, the present study aims to identify the environmental behaviour of the hotels in the region and thus evaluate their contribution to the sustainability of this tourist destination. In the empirical analysis, statistical techniques such as principal components and cluster analysis were used, and the results allowed the identification of three groups with different environmental behaviours.