Green practices in hotels: the case of the GreenLeaders Program from TripAdvisor

Abstract

Green or eco-friendly practices in the accommodation sector are growing around the world. Conscious customers demand these services. The purpose of this paper is to analyse eco-friendly practices developed by hotels within the GreenLeaders Program from TripAdvisor in six destinations: Boston and Chicago, Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris and Toronto. This information gathered is based on customer reviews published on TripAdvisor and hotel websites. The information is analysed from the concepts of evolutionary economic geography combine with consumer behaviour literature. Taking the six destinations as the main case study, this approach allows not only the comprehension of the green practices implemented by hotels, but also, customer recognition and perception about those practices related to sustainability.

Do Online Comments Affect Environmental Management? Identifying Factors Related to Environmental Management and Sustainability of Hotels

“…The methodology used in this study was, in the first place, sentiment analysis of traveler reviews on the TripAdvisor platform that works with processes of machine learning and that was trained with an algorithm developed in Python connected to the Monkeylearn library (MonkeyLearn, San Francisco, CA, USA) based on the research of Londoño and Hernandez-Maskivker [3, 10,27,[66][67][68]. Subsequently, textual analysis of the negative, neutral, and positive reviews was conducted using the qualitative analysis software Nvivo Pro 12 [10,69,70], which identifies key factors for the management of environmental issues by Swiss hotels using the presented process as a methodological support in the research conducted by Saura et al [3,49,71,72].…”

“…In one pertinent study, Londoño and Hernandez-Maskivker [27] applied sentiment analysis to analyze online reviews on TripAdvisor to identify environmental factors of the analyzed hotels. Likewise, Phillips et al [28] used sentiment analysis to analyze online reviews of Swiss hotels obtained from 69 different sources to extract indicators of environmental management.…”

“…This online platform has 350 million monthly visitors and contains over 300 million comments and opinions from real travelers, covering more than 6.2 million accommodations, restaurants, and attractions [37]. Of relevance for the present research, Londoño and Hernandez-Maskivker [27] applied sentiment analysis to the TripAdvisor comments on the sustainability of the hotels included in the TripAdvisor Green Leaders program to identify practices related to environmental sustainability.…”

“…When specific words occur recurrently, they give rise to a positive or negative feeling, thus demonstrating that sentiment analysis can be meaningfully applied to communication on social networks. In this relation, Londoño and Hernandez-Maskivker [27] applied sentiment analysis to comments on TripAdvisor, demonstrating that this social network is a suitable platform for this approach.…”

“…Furthermore, Londoño and Hernandez-Maskivker [27] applied sentiment analysis to TripAdvisor comments to identify practices related to environmental sustainability [54][55][56]. On the other hand, García et al (2012) [16] used a questionnaire to obtain information on the most important indicators that improve the management of environmental aspects by hotels [57][58][59][60].…”