Achieving sustainable development of green tourism supply chain: the trade-off between environmental and economic performances

The sustainable consumption and production of tourism products are the foundation for the sustainable development of the tourism industry. How to reduce the consumption of tourism resources and avoid the destruction of the tourism environment while improving the consumer experience of tourists and enhancing corporate profits is an urgent problem to be solved in the tourism industry. However, tourism enterprises frequently face the trade-off between green performance and economic performance, that is, tourism enterprises improve their green performance through green technology investment, and the green performance positively stimulates the tourist demand, resulting in the increase of tourist numbers in the tourism environment, which not only improves the economic performance, but also worsens the green performance. Based on the above trade-off and considering a green tourism supply chain (GTSC) composed of one green scenic spot and one travel agency, we model and derive the optimal green technology investment, pricing, advertising, and subsidy decisions of the green scenic spot and travel agency in the decentralized, centralized and bilateral cost sharing scenarios. Meanwhile, we explore the impacts of green preference, brand awareness, and tourism environment carrying capacity on the optimal decision makings and performances of the GTSC. Results show that although higher brand awareness can bring higher economic performances to enterprises, it seriously hurts the green performance of the tourism environment; Lower tourism environmental carrying capacity is not conducive to improving the green performance of the tourism environment, and can not create a higher economic performance for tourism enterprises. There is a relative unity between the economic and green performances of tourism enterprises when tourists' preference for green tourism is high.