Focus group design for information gathering: an application for circular economy in tourism

The Circular Economy opens a scenario of key business opportunities to improve tourism firms' competitiveness now and in the future. InnoEcoTur is a research project promoting models and strategies based on the Circular Economy in the tourism sector by the creation of a network in the area of hotels and restaurants. Members of the network will analyze first and later propose the implementation of a Circular Economy Strategy for the Tourist Sector of the Valencian Community, transferring also the results to companies of the industry. In the first stage of the project, we performed an audit of the industry needs and detected the potential improvements through the participation of the different stakeholders involved using focus groups. In this paper, we justify the design of the focus groups parameters such as size, location, or type of stakeholder to gather meaningful information for analysis. The methodology reveals to be adequate to draw a rough picture of the situation of Circular Economy in hotels and restaurants in the Valencian Community.