The Triple-A Model on sustainable-responsible tourism: towards responsustable tourism
One can easily apply the same four phases to the way our tourism stakeholders address environmental concern and sustainability. The idea of Frey's social stages was first applied to the tourism field by Mihalič and Kaspar (1996). Here the original four stages were reinvented and renamed. The first stage is the so-called ignorance stage that occurs before the destination considers environmental problems. Tourism stakeholders are unaware of such problems and thus express no concern at all; other, non-environmental sets of values determine their behaviour. As this phase acts somewhat as the pre-history of our sustainability discourse, the next stage is more relevant. This is a stage of environmental awareness, as exemplified by exposure to information on tourism environmental impacts and relationships that have made destinations sufficiently aware of tourism impacts that they can no longer be denied. Since tourism environmental concern, our starting point, is deeply connected with the current sustainable tourism ideology, sustainability issues inevitably enter the destination and create and shape so-called tourism sustainability awareness. The next stage involves the conceptual inclusion of sustainability issues, as defined above, because these become a matter of debate and are transferred into goals, coded into the destination's strategy and placed on its agenda. To shape and form the willingness to act consistently with the sustainability concept, the discussion of relevant policy instruments begins. Finally, the social-sustainability ethics and the need to act to achieve the strategic goals drive this process toward and into the last stage, which is the successful implementation of a sustainability policy and, hence, the stage of implementing sustainable action, thereby manifesting environmental responsibility. The destination, e.g., its stakeholders, behave in a sustainable manner, thus meeting the objectives and standards for sustainable development, business, products, etc