Fonte: Journal of Tourism & Development; Vol 46 (2024); 163-177
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Resumo: Innovation and sustainability represent important tools to increase the competitive advantage to tourism lodgings and to satisfy tourist needs. The purpose of this study is to analyze the practices used by tourist lodgings in terms of innovation and sustainability in the Douro Region, in Portugal. This work was based on a direct survey involving 43 tourism lodgings in this region. The results reveal that that 63% of tourism lodgings find reasons to innovate, but 28% never applied any innovation in it. In terms of sustainability the large majority of them (86%) refers integrate some actions related with sustainability, although 61% doesn´t has a plan of sustainability and over 77% doesn´t has any certification of sustainability. Summing up, the outcome of this study reveals that innovation and sustainability are topics that tourism lodgings have in consideration when thinking about the business strategy but are not the focus. This study has some limitations related with time constraints and the dimension of the sample. Specifically, time constraint did not allow us to have a higher response rate and making it impossible to undertake additionally a more qualitative study followed by the triangulation of findings.
