Predictors of willingness to pay a price premium for hotels’ water-saving initiatives

ABSTRACT

This study examines customers’ willingness to pay a premium to support hotels’ water-saving initiatives and the effect of different explanatory variables: attitude toward water conservation, water problem awareness, willingness to sacrifice, reported water-saving behavior, and frugality. A Heckit model is applied to a sample of 681 tourists. Results show that 44.3% of tourists would pay a premium to stay in a hotel that had installed water-saving devices in rooms. The average price premium they would pay is 4.29 euros. These findings help hotel managers identify tourists who could contribute to reducing the costs of going green.

KEYWORDS:

• Willingness to pay
• water-saving initiatives
• hotel management
• environmental concern
• price premium
• problem awareness
• willingness to sacrifice
• reported behavior
• frugality
• heckit model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under research project INTETUR (RTI2018-099467-B-I00) and Emerging Project grant of the University of Alicante (GRE17-15)