Water Resource Management in Hotels Using a Sustainable Balanced Scorecard
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Here are some further recommendations for the authors following the sections of the paper. Please, consider also corrections, marked text and comments in the pdf file.
Keywords
· Instead of water resources, I suggest water resources management
2. Tourism and water management on island destinations
· Water management on islands certainly depends also on natural conditions, like geological and hydrogeological structure, climate conditions, general runoff conditions (surface, underground), seasonal variations of water availability – and maybe some sentences explaining these would improve the paper. You are talking about climate change, yet, climate change impacts are not the same around the world, especially regarding water availability.
4. Methodology: designing a Sustainable Balanced Scorecard for water management in the hotel sector on island destinations
· Please, explain more in detail how the final selection of the proposed variables was done. Was it a professional evaluation conducted by authors of the study?
· You mention discussions and interviews with agents of the hotels, but we do not find out, how many interviews were conducted?
· Did you use any kind of a SWAT analysis to assemble the set of variables, presented in table 1.
5. Data collection
· I strongly suggest to put the first two paragraphs of this section under the sections 1 or 3, because their content is not linked directly to the data collection.
· I strongly suggest to move sub-section 5.1 under to section 2. as a sub-section 2.1.
· Was survey conducted on-line or live?
· How did you select a sample of hotels for the survey? According to their responsiveness, randomly …?
· Please describe the types of variables according to measurement scale, describe types of questions (open, semi open, likert type, closed …)
· Please, put the questionnaire as a supplemental material of the paper.
· Name the software used for performing data analysis.
6. results
· Replace table 2 (see pdf for further details)
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you very much for your review, please find attached our comments in the attached PDF. We really appreciate your time and contribution that has helped to enrich this reviewed version.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This study presents interesting and innovative approach to the topic of water management in tourist sector with scorecard based on SDs. The only weakness of the study is need for more data but authors have addressed and elaborated this issue.
The main objectives of the review are clear and supported by references, but some small corrections would be needed, and they are stated in comments in attached PDF.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you very much for your review, please find attached our comments in the attached PDF. We really appreciate your time and contribution that has helped to enrich this reviewed version.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
It is essential to find a balance between tourism development and consumption of water
resources, especially on island tourism destinations. To help achieve that goal this paper proposes a Sustainable Balanced Scorecard, connected to the Sustainable Development Goals, for an optimal management of water resources consumed by hotels.this study can provide support to further strengthen the linkage between business actions and SDG indicators that has already been started by international institutions.It has certain theoretical and practical value.The overall framework structure is reasonable, with a certain degree of innovation, the argument is reasonable, but there are some problems：
1. Modify it according to the format of reference in Sustainability.
2. The name of the figure in the text is not in the right position,such as Figure 1. The name of the figure in the text should usually be at the bottom of the figure.
3. The paper mentioned that the data was obtained according to the design of the questionnaire, but there was no detailed design process of the questionnaire or explanation of the rationality of the questionnaire design.
4. The determination of key variables in Table 1 lacks scientific and reasonable basis.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your review, please find attached our comments in the attached PDF. We really appreciate your time and contribution that has helped to enrich this reviewed version.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The manuscript concenrs the important issue of water management control in hotels on island destinations using sustainable balanced scorecard. he elaborated tool is based on four perspectives: customer’s, internal processes’, learning and improvement, and financial. The Sustainable Balanced Scorecard was tested empirically on a sample of 70 hotels of island tourism destinations in the Macaronesia region. Remarks: Abstract should be more concise. Articles should indicate a detailed discrepancies in published research results, lack of synthesis of conclusions resulting from the survey occurs. The introduction section does not explain the novelty of this work and how much of a difference or knowledge is produces by presenting this paper. The captions of figures should be under the figures, eg. Figure 1. Water consumption per guest-night in the hotel sector of the Macaronesia region (litres). Lack of lines numbering. According to the typographic rules, the decimal part is separated by a dot, and the comma is used, for example, to separate thousands, so the whole text, figures, tables should be prepared according to this rule. Is there any other statistical analysis? How do the authors ensure the reliability of their results? In what way this manuscript will help the hotels? In reference abbreviation of journal papers and doi number should be presented. Authors should improve the presented references according to journal’s guidelines.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your review, please find attached our comments in the attached PDF. We really appreciate your time and contribution that has helped to enrich this reviewed version.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Made serious modification according to the review suggestion, agreed to accept.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your notes and for your comments.
Reviewer 4 Report
The manuscript concenrs the important issue of water management control in hotels on island destinations using sustainable balanced scorecard. he elaborated tool is based on four perspectives: customer’s, internal processes’, learning and improvement, and financial. The Sustainable Balanced Scorecard was tested empirically on a sample of 70 hotels of island tourism destinations in the Macaronesia region. Remarks: The last part of this section: 7.1 The need for clear and reliable indicators:
The choice of reference could be supplemented with respect to the water management but also to emphasise their sustainability achievements when informing their customers, which can influence customers’ satisfaction as presented in [e.g. Ref [Consumers’ Perceptions of the Supply of Tap Water in Crisis Situations. Energies 2020, 13, 3617. https://doi.org/10.3390/en13143617. Add some information about the perspective of the future work.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your comments. We have added in the point 7.1 the references that was suggested and also commented the current trend of big platforms like Booking on visualising the environmental policies of the hotel as a sign of distinction.
In addition, we have added a paragraph about the future lines of research in the conclusions. Other changes that you can see in the new version are due to grammar and format adjustments.
For any additional information we are at your disposal.
Kind Regards
