To green or not to green. An evaluation of the influence of hotel green practices on guests’ satisfaction

As a result of the recent focus on environmental sustainability in several different industries worldwide, the hospitality industry is increasingly adopting sustainable business practices such as ecolabelling or environmental management systems. The aim of this study is to evaluate the customer satisfaction resulting from the impact of green practices in eco-friendly hotels, by comparing the perceptions of both certified green hotels and non-green hotels guests through the content analysis of their online reviews. More in de-tail, the authors analysed through a content analysis software overall 3412 reviews concerning 20 hotels retrieved on Google, and found out that, by focusing on a list of specific keywords connected to green practices and customer satisfaction, domestic and international guests of Italian green hotels (chosen from an official list of the Ecolabel certified ones) and non-green hotels exactly from the same geographic area and ranked in the same category (i.e. 4-star ho-tels) surprisingly presented very similar results despite the different values promoted in their websites