Accommodation Consumers and Providers’ Attitudes, Behaviours and Practices for Sustainability: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Accommodation and lodging are an integral component of the tourism and hospitality industry. Given the sectors' growing contribution to resource consumption and waste, there is a growing body of literature on the attitudes, behaviours and practices of consumers, managers, staff and owners of lodging with respect to sustainability. This paper presents the results of a systematic analysis of articles on attitudes, behaviours and practices of consumers and the provision of accommodation with respect to sustainability. The results indicate that there is a dearth of longitudinal studies on the sustainability of practices and behaviours. There are limitations in geographical coverage as well as methods, with research dominated by convenience sampling approaches. It is concluded that while there appear to be improvements in the potential sustainability of lodging with respect to technological approaches, the lack of systematic long-term studies on behavioural interventions represents a significant challenge to reducing the absolute emissions of the sector as well as reductions in energy and water use and waste production. Given the lack of longitudinal studies, it is not known whether observed behavioural changes are sustained over time.

The contribution of small accommodations to a sustainable tourism industry

“…The low sample size and geographical limitation prevent generalisation of findings of this research. Nevertheless, this exploratory study has contributed to the limited literature on Australian small accommodation sector (Hall et al, 2016) identifying SAPs drivers and challenges in implementing sustainable practices and new avenues for future research.…”

“…Small accommodation lodgings have the potential to contribute to the sustainability objectives of the tourism destinations within which they are located (Morrison et al, 2010). Despite the central role of the small accommodation sector to the Australian tourism industry (Hall et al, 2016;Kookana & Quinn, 2013), limited research has been undertaken into the sustainable practices of small accommodation providers (SAPs) (Hall et al, 2016). The majority of such studies have considered issues associated with environmental sustainability, including influencing guest behavior (e.g.…”

The Environmental Attitudes and Behaviours of European Golf Tourists

“…Environmental attitudes and behaviours have been extensively studied in the outdoor recreation literature [36][37][38][39][40][41][42] as well as in sustainable tourism literature [20,[43][44][45][46][47]. However, the sustainability of golf from the consumer's perspective has been very little studied [10,18,48,49].…”

Social License to Operate and Adaptive Co-Marketing: Exchange, Social Capital and Community-Based Social Marketing

“…Bonding forms of social capital can provide opportunities to social marketers to take advantage of the presence of social norms in influencing behaviour, e.g. in encouraging recycling or water usage in hotels [78,88], especially when embedded social practices are tackled as well [77,79,89]. However, if bonding forms dominate social capital formation social marketing can face difficulties in informing an audience about a social issue [51].…”

“…However, in social marketing the notion of exchange is more than just economic and also includes social exchange. The content of exchange can be utilitarian (economic and relatively tangible), symbolic (psychological, social and intangible) or a combination of both utilitarian and symbolic, in fact given the embeddedness of economic exchange in identity and social practices most exchanges are mixed [51,52,[77][78][79].…”