SPRONG Hospitable Transitions

The hospitality domain is of great importance to the Dutch economy. In 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic, it generated a turnover of €91.2 billion and employed around 813,000 people, and in quantitative terms it has since fully recovered. The pandemic showed, however, that the sector has only limited resilience in times of crisis.

The limits to further growth are also becoming ever more visible and tangible: social impacts such as noise, waste, rising house prices and crowding, and environmental effects such as greenhouse gases, plastics, declining water quality and land use. The hospitality domain puts pressure on climate, biodiversity, cultural heritage, landscape and the liveability of local communities — while depending on the quality of that very living environment for its own future.

Scalable and replicable solutions that would allow the domain to break away from an unsustainable development path have so far remained limited. Realising a transition demands a deliberate ‘niche’ approach: the sector — certainly in the Netherlands — is dominated by micro and SME businesses and is organisationally fragmented. This starting position calls for consciously building an ecosystem in which stakeholders work on solutions to local societal challenges and scale them up into a continuous, purposeful movement towards a sustainable sector.

Together with frontrunners and ‘disruptors’ from the hospitality domain, the SPRONG group works in four regional transition arenas in an interactive, design-driven and experimental way on the transition themes of climate neutrality, broad prosperity, healthy region and regenerative area development. These four themes create a direct link with the policy agendas and societal challenges in these regions.

A national transition forum facilitates and organises the optimal design of the transition arenas, knowledge sharing and the creation of learning effects at domain level. This forum supports consortium and network partners in advancing the practical conditions for scaling and replicating successful practices — and thereby achieving impact at the level of system change.

The SPRONG group is a collaboration of eight professorships across four universities of applied sciences: NHL Stenden (lead), Breda University of Applied Sciences (BUAS), HZ University of Applied Sciences and Inholland. The participating institutions have close ties with the Centre of Expertise Leisure, Tourism & Hospitality (CELTH) and the professorship platform ‘Sustainable Urban Tourism’. Field partners include Innovatiepact Fryslân, Toerisme Alliantie Fryslân, Stichting Van Gogh Homeland, the Province of Noord-Holland, Merk Fryslân, Destinatie Nederland and the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area.

The additional financial and organisational capacity connected to the SPRONG programme is used to develop, maintain and put to work a robust yet flexible ecosystem of local, regional and national partners, connected to an equally robust and flexible knowledge infrastructure for sustainability transitions in the hospitality domain.