Are publicly traded tourism and hospitality providers greenwashing?

Greenwashing refers to a practice where firms try to earn undeserved moral credits by not "walking" their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) "talk." Tourism and hospitality providers have long been accused of greenwashing. However, despite the importance of greenwashing for the industry, we still lack ecologically valid evidence on the extent to which a) tourism and hospitality providers greenwash and b) whether customers penalize tourism and hospitality providers for greenwashing. To address this gap, we use an objective, theorydriven, granular, and comparable (across sub-sectors) greenwashing measure for 253 traded tourism and hospitality firms for the period 2004-2017. For the years 2018-2022, due to missing data, we show the state of greenwashing using an abbreviated measure. In contrast to greenwashing research published in this journal and elsewhere, we show that-on average-providers across all major tourism and hospitality sectors do not greenwash. However, the ones that do, experience a significant sales drop.