Uncovering the effect of environmental performance on hotels’ financial performance: a global outlook

ABSTRACT

Using a sample of 6,657 hotels from 67 low-income countries and 65 high-income countries, we estimated the impact of environmental performance on hotels’ sales and profit margins. The positive impact of environmental performance on sales for the two groups of countries indicates that the green hotels created market differentiation and attracted eco-friendly tourists. For high-income countries, the profit margin in green hotels is 1.7% higher than in other hotels. For low-income countries, the lack of a positive impact of environmental performance on green hotels’ profit margins implies a lower environmental efficiency of environmental practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental performance
• hotels
• financial performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).