The hotel sector, one of the main pillars of the tourism industry, recognizes its social responsibility and considers it as part of its image. For this reason, firms require new variables and tools to respond to stakeholders’ needs. Trust is an essential variable in meeting these needs. However, managers are unaware that they can achieve much more through trust than through other variables. In this paper, with a sample of 629 guests in four international hotels, we use a model to show that the corporate social responsibility (CSR) association affects not only customers’ loyalty and the image they have of the hotel, but also their trust. Furthermore, this study confirms that the presence of trust as a mediator between CSR and image and loyalty leads to increased loyalty and positive image among guests. Our study shows that hotels should invest in socially responsible initiatives and develop actions to strengthen trust in order to improve their image and increase loyalty. We anticipate that our study will be a starting point for strengthening the literature on this issue, and call on researchers to extend enquiry in this field and provide hotels with guidelines for improvement in the above-mentioned variables using trust as a mediator.

Even though the World Tourism Organization described Sustainable Tourism as a tourism form that could contribute to the future survival of the industry, the current reality is quite different, since it has not been firmly established in society at expected levels. The present study analyzes which variables drive the consumption of this tourism type, taking tourist awareness as the key element. To this awareness, we must add the current crisis experienced by the tourism industry caused by COVID-19, since it can benefit Sustainable Tourism development, promoting less crowded destinations that favor social distancing. For this, the existing literature on Sustainable Tourism has been examined in order to create a model that highlights the relations among these variables. To determine the meaning of these relations, a sample of 308 tourists was analyzed through structural equation models using Partial Least Squares. The results show that there is a clear attitude on the part of the tourist to develop Sustainable Tourism, driven by the positive effects and motivation it entails, as well as the satisfaction the tourist perceives when consuming a responsible tourism type.