Festival attendees’ perceptions of green hotel practices

Abstract

Lodging managers and festival organizers have an incentive to understand how festival attendees perceive hotels with green practices in place. Lodging managers that understand how to segment, target, and position their offerings to festival attendees, including sustainable practices, can maximize financial gains from festivals. Festival organizers have related interests: they want to minimize negative impacts on the physical environment and maximize positive customer experiences on- and off-site. To provide insights into festival attendees’ perceptions of green hotel practices that may assist both sets of stakeholders, the manuscript presents the results of a survey of convenience samples from two food festivals. The analysis relates perceptions of hotel desirability to characteristics that have been successfully used to segment consumers in the past. While gender, education, income, and environmental values did not have significant relationships with whether thirteen sustainable hotel practices increased hotel desirability, age, festival type, and environmental self-efficacy did. The results, which include ratings of the thirteen green practices, have practical implications for festival organizers, who may want to collaborate with greener hotels to minimize negative festival outcomes, and for lodging managers, who may want to segment festival audiences and appropriately position hotel sustainable practices for festival attendees.