Sustainability and Resilience for the Success of Tourism SMEs

The tourism sector, after experiencing a long period of development, faced a setback due to covid-19. This halt in growth has had immediate economic consequences and social repercussions as it accounts for around 10% of the EU’s and employs around 27 million people. The glimpsed end of the pandemic, as well as the need to learn to live with this type of situations, represent an opportunity to radically rethink the mindset to the tourism sector. A sustainable approach, able to balance the needs of all the stakeholders and to minimize the impact on the planet, represents the real challenge for the revival of the sector. Small- and medium-sized tourist enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in the successful implementation of a sustainable strategy to relaunch the sector. Therefore, this paper aims to understand the state of the sustainability strategies among tourist Italian SMEs to identify current weaknesses and potential opportunities to catch. This study is based on a mixed research method. Starting from the ETIS toolkit, which is the European Tourism Indicators System for sustainable destination management, we carried out an online survey addressed to the tourism players, members of the Italian Confederation of Craft Trades and Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (CNA). This enabled us to investigate the tourist Italian SMEs sustainable performance, using a comparable common approach. We collected primary data and elaborated them to depict the current situation about the following categories of analysis: destination management, social and cultural impact, economic value, and environmental impact. Findings allow us to detect a strong interest in including sustainability in companies' strategies, to strengthen resilience and exit the crisis triggered by covid-19.