Environmental sustainable management of small rural tourist enterprises

Rural and nature tourism has experienced high growth over the past 20 years. One of the primary challenges facing rural tourism management is to establish a profitable and environmentally sustain-able industry. Moreover, sustainable tourism is a complex concept and it requires that nature and tourism activity should be studied from an integrated point of view. In this paper, we analyze how the environmental perceptions of entrepreneurs are included into business management. Through a partial least squares (PLS) model, we estimate several latent factors related to various aspects of business management and, in a second phase, we use the FIMIX-PLS algorithm to achieving a segmentation of entrepreneurs according to the structure of relationships obtained, which may allow identification of which factors are more related to an "ecopreneurial management"