7. Assessing the Effectiveness of Reporting Systems: Why and How

This chapter proposes and describes a methodology to assess the effectiveness of the reporting systems for responsible tourism and CSR available in Europe, the scope being to give tourism businesses a set of elements useful to choose the program that best responds to their characteristics and requirements. Through the application of a mathematical and multi-criteria decision model, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the main characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of every program have been evaluated and compared, according to different criteria. Better than a qualitative analysis, AHP analyses the performance of every alternative with respect to each parameter and finally calculates a value that expresses the overall quality and effectiveness of each system in assessing business responsibility. In particular, the main criteria that have been selected are as follows: the degree of attention paid by every program to all triple bottom line dimensions; the opportunity for small and medium-sized enterprises to apply the system; the integration between the “certification approach” and the “responsible tourism approach”; the transparency given by the type of auditing. The method selects the best reporting system to apply, according to the importance given to each criterion taken into account.