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In this paper, the authors assume that the matter of a good quality of air will grow in importance in the future, and that it could be a noticeable part of a quality system to be used for communication purposes. The authors propose some synthetic indicators for air quality and discuss them in-depth to provide robust indexes suitable for ranking a set of alpine destinations.

The authors use locally based data on three pollutants with reference to 25 alpine touristic destinations. Starting from hourly data for 62 days of the 2014 summer season for each pollutant, the authors end with a single synthetic air quality index for any locality. The aggregation methodologies are at the core of the paper; in particular, the authors propose a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) function – a well-known tool in Economics – to aggregate the pollutants the authors deal with. Because the degree of substitution among them is unknown, the authors simulate two extreme cases and an intermediate one to rank the localities on the bases of the synthetic air quality index.

All the Alpine destinations the authors considered have – or had in summer 2014 – an excellent open-air quality, and this was a permanent trait of that period. Ranks look robust (stable), as they do not depend significantly on the available options of the techniques the authors used.

The originality of the paper is inherent first in the idea that high quality air can be an issue of interest for touristic goals, especially in the case of mountain destinations, which have all proven to offer an excellent open-air quality. Second, from a methodological perspective, the paper frames dispersed and sectorial approaches into a single flexible one which has the property of being theoretically grounded into the economics mainstream and, at meantime, suitable to deal with some lack of information and research.

The aim of this paper is to profile the World Hospitality and Tourism Themes (WHATT) theme issue “Tourism sustainability in the Alpine region: What are the major trends and challenges?” with reference to the experience of the theme editors and writing team.

This paper uses structured questions to enable the theme editors to reflect on the rationale for the theme issue question, the starting-point, the selection of the writing team and material and the editorial process.

It draws on a multidisciplinary approach to identify some key components of sustainable tourism for the French and Italian Alps. It reflects on research and stakeholder interaction that helped to shape the current and future thinking about how Alpine mountain resorts can enhance sustainability in relation to the destination offer, accommodation, transport and mobility and institutional, legal and socio-economic aspects.

The theme issue outcomes provide lines of enquiry for others to explore, and they reinforce the value of WHATT’s approach to collaborative working and writing.

The work reported in this theme issue provides research-based evidence of the need for rapid adaptation to sustainable tourism development for resorts in the French and Italian Alps. Traditionally designed to facilitate skiing and snow sports, the impact of climate change is forcing a rethink to safeguard Alpine tourism – a vital economic activity to these and most mountain tourism destinations.