Sustainability and customers' hotel choice behaviour: a choice-based conjoint analysis approach

Due to rising environmental concern and awareness amongst consumers, efforts to make hotel operations sustainable are becoming increasingly important. The study here is designed to investigate the contributions of sustainability in consumers' overall hotel choice decision, particularly which attributes of sustainability is relatively more important amongst others. Data were collected using both qualitative (word association test) and quantitative (orthogonal choice design survey) measures from the sample of 168 and 405 hotel customers, respectively, through purposive sampling technique. The qualitative research identified that customers perceive energy conservation, recycling, and greenscaping as key sustainable practices pertaining to the hotel industry. The findings of choice-based conjoint analysis confirm that sustainability is the most preferred attribute in the hotel choice decision in the present milieu. Moreover, consumers strongly associate greenscaping with the sustainable practices most in the hotel industry. The study significantly contributes to the measurement of sustainability in theory and practice in hospitality and tourism industry.