Thailand is actively working to position itself as a sustainable tourism destination, with sustainability embedded within the nation’s tourism industry framework. Assessment and certification play pivotal roles, serving as essential tools that validate the implementation of sustainable management practices within the accommodation sector. This article explores the concept of sustainable tourism through the lens of widely adopted certifications in Thailand’s hotel industry. A content analysis was conducted to compare certifications based on the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) criteria. Furthermore, the study evaluated the efficacy of certifications in promoting the practical integration of sustainable tourism. To deepen the analysis, a thematic review examined the extent to which these certifications integrate principles of Environmental Management Systems (EMSs). The findings highlight a tendency of certification organizations to prioritize environmental aspects over economic and social dimensions. This suggests a need for better alignment in facilitating the holistic integration of sustainable tourism principles into certification practices.

This systematic literature review reveals into the jurisdiction of sustainable tourism development, serving as a comprehensive exploration of current knowledge on emerging practices and innovations. By exclusively incorporating research focused on innovative drivers in sustainable tourism development from selected journals and specific periods, the review meticulously analyzes 32 research papers using the PRISMA framework. The objective is to gain a clear understanding of how sustainable tourism innovations are approached in terms of research themes, disciplines, and methodologies. The findings reveal a noteworthy upswing in research on sustainable tourism development, particularly in areas like rural homestays, farms, and social tourism, often employing econometric models and descriptive statistics. Despite this surge, the review identifies a research gap pertaining to diverse sustainability issues. It also charts a compelling direction for future research, aligning with the current strategic agenda of sustainability in the tourism industry.

This paper points out indicators of responsible tourism which are of strategic significance to tour operators seeking to develop their country towards achieving a competitive advantage. It looks at the extant literature covering the notions of responsible tourism and responsible tour operators. Qualitative research involved in-depth and semi-structured interview questions employed to collect responsible tourism data from tour operators’ direct experiences. The findings revealed that eighty-eight responsible tourism indicators for tour operators could be divided into five categories relating to the responsibility of tour operators, organisations’ sustainability policies, products and services, partners and clients, benefits for society and culture, economic benefits, and benefits for the environment.

Though, the prevalent attitude-behavior inconsistency is still one of the critical issues in sustainable tourism, whereby positive environmental attitudes do not necessarily result in green tourism behavior. This paper explores the factors influencing green tourism behavioral intention as well as the potential mediating effect of willingness to pay (WTP). Environmental awareness, green destination attributes, attitude, willingness to pay, and behavioral intention have been incorporated into the cross-cultural perspective. This study has adopted a quantitative research design involving a cross-sectional survey among domestic and foreign tourists. The findings reveals destination greenness is found to be more influential in attitude formation, followed by environmental awareness. In turn, attitudes have strong impact on both WTP and behavioral intentions, with WTP being a partial mediator between attitude and behavioral intention, thus indicating the presence of attitude-behavior gap. Furthermore, Multi-group analysis has shown significant cross-cultural differences in behavioral conversion mechanism for domestic and international tourists.