SUSTAINABILITY AS AN ATTRIBUTE OF HOTEL CHOICE

The attention on sustainability has been increasingly influencing the development of the tourism sector and of the destination competitiveness (Bohdanowicz, 2005). Especially the hospitality industry has generally a heavy and negative economic, environmental, and socio-cultural impact on the destination (e.g. consumption of energy, water, food) (Crouch, 2007; Mazanec et al. 2007; Font and McCabe, 2017). For these reasons hotels have to face hard pressure by international and national stakeholders (Dasanayaka et al. 2022; Buffa et al. 2015). From the one hand, new regulations (e.g. waste management) affect daily procedures and operations. On the other hand, a growing segment of customers is willing to pay a premium price to stay in a “green hotel” (Chang et al., 2015). Therefore, it is really important for hotels to understand how sustainability is perceived by customers and its role as a hotel attribute during the hotel choice process. The paper examines the importance of sustainability as an attribute that determines the hotel choice. The paper wants to contribute to existent literature about sustainability in hospitality, investigating the concept of sustainability as multidimensional (environmental, economic and social). Therefore, the study has the purpose to investigate the importance that hotel consumers give to sustainable practices among other hotel attributes, considering the various dimensions. Moreover, the study analyses the motivations and factors that influence guests’ hotel choice (Xu and Gursoy, 2015; Han, 2021; Gerdt et al., 2019). The research questions the study investigates could be summarized as follows: RQ1: Which is the importance of sustainability for hotel guests among various hotel attributes? RQ2: Which are the most important dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, and social) for hotel guests