Research involving an UTM scholar explored whether there is a gap between hotel guests’ environmental attitudes and what they do during their stay, and how that can affect the business performance of accommodation providers
A recent study, which involved Lecturer Mr. Don Wu Chi Wai from UTM, has substantiated a hypothesis that there is a “significant difference” between the environmental attitudes reported by certain hotel guests and their actual actions during their stay. This discrepancy – referred to as a “gap” by the researchers – could be particularly evident concerning water and energy conservation, guest room-linen reuse, and whether there was any reduction in use of disposable supplies. Essentially, some hotel patrons expressed environmentally-conscious attitudes without translating them into eco-friendly forms of behaviour during their hotel stays.
The study utilised a mixed approach: first, researchers employed a questionnaire survey to investigate the potential disparity between customers’ environmental attitudes and behaviour when staying in a hotel. Then, they developed a mathematical model to analyse the repercussions on a hotel’s performance in situations where the hotelier wrongly predicted the consumption behaviour of its customers. This model encompassed optimal pricing for hotel rates, occupancy rates, profitability, and overall carbon emissions. It analysed how the proportion of customers exhibiting an attitude-behaviour ‘gap’ regarding green practices could also impact hotel performance.
The authors put hotel guests in one of three categories: those openly unsupportive of carbon emission reduction; those expressing support for it but exhibiting inconsistent behaviour; and those whose actions aligned with their stated supportive attitudes.
Overall, the study found that customers failing to adopt environmentally-friendly behaviour imposed higher operational costs on hotels, thereby potentially diminishing profits. During peak seasons, however, this issue was less problematic as demand for accommodation often surpassed supply, allowing hotels to maximise profits by adjusting prices accordingly.
Conversely, during off-peak periods, lower occupancy rates compelled hotels to fix lower room rates to attract guests. If such guests exhibited an attitude-behaviour gap, resulting in increased carbon emissions and associated costs, it could adversely affect profitability.
The researchers suggested that hotels facing cost pressures associated with a transformation to low-carbon operations could encourage ‘green’ customer behaviour and implement pricing strategies to offset the costs of such initiatives. They noted that customers with higher degrees of environmental concern were more willing to pay a premium for so-called “green hotel practices”.
The researchers acknowledged the challenge of identifying customers whose actions contradicted their stated environmental attitudes. But the authors suggested businesses could still achieve gains by promoting positive environmental attitudes among customers who currently do not support carbon-emission reductions.
The research, which involved collaboration between Mr. Wu and researchers from the School of Business at Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangdong Province, received funding from various sources, namely the Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation of Guangdong Province, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Excellent Young Team Project Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province
It resulted in the academic paper “Impact of customer environmental attitude-behavior gap”, published last year in the Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing. (Click here for access to full paper.)
Editor: UTM Public Relations Team
