Effect of Strategic Planning on Sustainable Development Within the Hotel Industry in Nairobi Kenya

Abstract

Strategic planning is a critical area that influences sustainable development of a firm by ensuring proper allocation of the available resources in accordance with the achievement of the objective. This effect also depends on the policy adopted from one hotel to the other. When firms proactively formulate sound and well-planned strategies, they increase their capability of tackling challenges such as the advancement of technology, globalization, emergence of new markets and deregulation which influences the sustainability of development project. However, when the hotel fails to incorporate strategic planning in their development projects challenges such as insufficient funds, lack of proper order of procedures and activities, unprecedented occurrences and other emerging factors may cripple down the project leading to its termination. Therefore, a sustainable development requires a strategic plan which is lucrative in sustaining the development and achieving the targeted goals. The study sought to examine the effect of strategic planning on sustainable development within the hotel industry in Nairobi Kenya. The study targeted hotels that are within Nairobi in Kenya since they are easily accessible. The study used factors of sustainable development which are strategic planning, social sustainability, economic factors and environmental factors as independent variables of the study. The study identified 105 hotels across Nairobi County and was able to collect primary data through questionnaires which were issued via online survey whose link was sent to all the hotel managers. The study therefore obtained 105 responses which were found adequate for data analysis. This study undertook descriptive statistics that described the data collected for each variable in form of mean, Std. deviation and also Coefficient of variation. In summary the performance of sustainable development of hotels was found to be good as it recorded a mean of 16.77. The hotels highly incorporated strategic planning in their developments as indicated by a high mean of 26.53. Although the hotels adopted social sustainability and improved economic and environmental factors to enhance sustainability of their development the hotels put more effort in social and economic improvement than in environmental improvement when doing so as indicated by the means of 14.87, 15.85 and 13.16 respectively. The correlation that was undertaken indicated that all the independent variables had significant effect on sustainable development. The regression analysis was employed in determining the significance of the effect of strategic planning on sustainable development of hotels in Nairobi County. The regression model adopted by the model was only able to describe 50.5%. The adjusted R square on the other hand was smaller than R square that indicates that there were some elements in the model that did not help to improve the model. The study found that strategic planning has a significant impact on the sustainable development of hotel industry within Nairobi in Kenya. The p-value of the F-test was less than 0.05 and therefore the study found statistically significant effect of strategic planning on sustainable development of hotel industry within Nairobi in Kenya. The regression coefficients indicated that strategic planning social sustainable and economic factors had positive significant effect on sustainable development while environmental factors had a positive insignificant impact on sustainable development.