Purpose This paper proposes a group multi-criteria decision-making framework for the assessment of social sustainability practices in hospitality and tourism (H&T) supply chain (SC) and applies it to the Egyptian H&T industry. Design/methodology/approach The authors reviewed the relevant literature on social sustainability in H&T, followed by a survey of 187 managers, supervisors, and employees from H&T SCs to identify the current adoption of 53 social practices classified in 8 social categories. An experts-group survey with 22 experts was conducted to obtain the importance of each practice. The Interval Valued Pythagorean Fuzzy Distance to Ideal Solution based on TOPSIS was used to rank and assess the current level of social practices adoption. Findings The study found that social sustainability practices are poorly adopted in the Egyptian H&T SC. In terms of social categories, “society development” was ranked best while “health and safety” was the worst adopted. Hotels were better at implementing social practices than tour operators and tourism companies, and tourism suppliers were the worst in applying social sustainability practices. Although there were not social sustainability adoption substantial differences between SC partners, there were discrepancies within the same social categories and across different social categories. Originality/value This study presents a unique and practical social sustainability assessment framework for multi-tier H&T SCs. Since few authors attempt to assess social sustainability practices in H&T SC context, the framework provides an opportunity for guiding decision and policy makers to improve the poorly ranked social practices.
Elbelehy et al. (Sat,) studied this question.