Understanding Guests’ Intention to Visit Green Hotels

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to expand existing knowledge of hotel consumers’ green behaviors by merging value-belief-norm theory and the theory of planned behavior into one theoretical framework to understand comprehensively consumers’ decision-making processes with respect to their intentions to visit a green hotel. Data collected from 757 respondents were analyzed. The results indicate that our integrated framework demonstrates a favorable level of prediction power for guests’ behavior, which verified the superiority of the suggested framework. Furthermore, its findings from fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis indicate that: (a) attitude toward green hotels, perceived behavioral control, sense of obligation, and corporate image are key drivers of guests’ intentions to visit green hotels; (b) three distinct configurations of guests’ intention drivers are likely to result in a high degree of intentions among customers to visit green hotels. The three solutions all contain the conditions of high attitude, corporate image, biospheric value, and green activities, which means that these conditions are vital components of a high intention among customers to visit green hotels. This study contributes to the growing literature on sustainability in marketing and practice by providing useful insights about the determinants of guests’ behavior to use green hotels in the Egyptian hospitality context. It is one of the first empirical studies examining factors affecting guests’ behavior to use green hotels in the Egyptian hospitality context.