Guest eco-friendly attitudes and response behaviors towards green hotel in Malaysia

Due to increasing awareness on the environmental concern among the society nowadays,eco-friendly products had become one of the increasing demands in the market.As for hotel industry,this leads the customer to choose to stay at green practices hotel when they travel.Even though there is an increasing pattern of demand for the green hotel,hoteliers however,still refuse to invest in this green practices.In order to attract them to make investments in this green hotel,a deeper understanding on the guest need and preferences for green hotel is very crucial as it will lead the organizations to design more effective and efficient strategy to be implemented in their properties later on.Thus,this study attempted to understand the underlying factor that lead to the green hotel consumption by answering the following research question:1)is there positive relationship between eco- friendly attitudes with intention to stay at green hotel?;2)is there positive relationship between eco-friendly attitudes with willingness to pay more for green hotel?; and 3)is there positive relationship between eco-friendly attitudes with engagement in positive word-of-mouth towards green hotel?This study involved guests’ of ten green hotels that had won ASEAN Green Hotel Award 2014 which located dispersedly in Peninsular Malaysia,Sabah and Sarawak.Online survey was fully utilized whereby a total of 210 samples were collected by using self-completed questionnaire to answer these research questions.From the analysis done,findings showed that guests’ eco-friendly attitudes significantly related to their response behavior which is intention to stay (p=0.000),willingness to pay more (p=0.009),and also engage in positive word-of-mouth (p=0.000) towards green hotel.Among the demographic factors studied,age showed differences for the response behavior.However,findings from this study indicate that eco-friendly attitudes does not significantly differ among gender,marital status,education level,household income per month and also race.As for the future research,few recommendations were suggested which is study is suggested to be done in other type of hotel setting like economy and mid-scale green hotels as this study was done in five star green hotels. esides that,comparison study to see the response behavior between domestic and international guests is also recommended for future research