Strategic–financial integration in tourism businesses for organizational resilience and sustainable performance

Abstract

Tourism businesses operate in a highly dynamic environment characterized by changing tourist preferences, demand seasonality, intense competition, digital transformation, and vulnerability to economic crises, regulatory changes, natural disasters, and other external disruptions. These conditions suggest that tourism organizations can no longer rely solely on visitor growth or revenue generation as indicators of managerial effectiveness. Instead, they require closer integration between strategic management and financial management. This paper aims to examine the respective roles of these two managerial functions and to develop a conceptual framework explaining how their integration may contribute to business performance, organizational resilience, and sustainability in the tourism sector. A structured narrative literature review was employed by synthesizing literature related to strategic management, financial management, strategic management accounting, dynamic capabilities, risk management, performance measurement, and sustainable tourism. The review indicates that strategic management provides organizational direction through environmental analysis, strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, whereas financial management translates strategic priorities into investment decisions, financing choices, budgeting, working capital management, risk management, and financial performance evaluation. Integrating these functions enables tourism organizations to allocate resources more effectively, respond to market changes, maintain liquidity, manage uncertainty, and balance growth objectives with long-term sustainability. This paper proposes an integrated framework consisting of four stages: environmental and financial assessment, strategic choice and resource allocation, strategy implementation and financial control, and performance evaluation and strategic feedback. The framework further suggests that tourism business performance should be assessed not only through financial indicators but also through customer, operational, organizational capability, risk, and sustainability dimensions.