4.3 Evaluating corporate sustainability in action

It is not just in the Global South where sustainability is a stated aim. Atlas Hotels, headquartered in Leicester in the UK, also highlights sustainability as one of the key aspects of its business. It reports on this annually. Atlas has 59 hotels in the UK and 1 in Germany and more than 2,500 employees. In their ‘Impact Report 2024’ flipbook (2025) they note that they are ‘positively impacting 16 of the UN SDGs; two more than last year’ (p.7). They track sustainability as a score (p.11) so they can keep track of how sustainable they are with the aim of continuing to do better. Furthermore, they raise money for charities (p.47) and aim to reduce energy, waste and water and report on that too (pp.14–16).

If we look at both these initiatives with the SEE framework, though, do we find they follow all the principles? Neither the Principe Collection nor Atlas talk explicitly about youth employment opportunities (although the Principe Collection talks about youth education). Atlas doesn’t mention local suppliers or food sustainability. The Principe Collection doesn’t tell us whether women’s or youth groups make goods for its shops (if they have them). Both hotel groups appear to be responsible to their owners and shareholders rather than solely the community they are in, unlike KAFRED. It is not clear, in either example, that individual staff can propose changes, for example, deciding which local groups to support.

This is not to say that both the Principe Collection and Atlas are not trying to be more sustainable – they clearly are. But it is the case that, with no agreed definition, the aspects of sustainability that are followed can be down to what is wanted by a company or by its shareholders. As tourists, if sustainability is important to us, we need to see through what companies ‘say’ and consider, instead, what they ‘do’.

Some academics believe that the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘responsibility’ are linked and that you cannot have one without the other. We go onto responsibility next.