Which hotel guest segments reuse towels? Selling sustainable tourism services through target marketing

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews and evaluates the wide range of supply and demand side measures employed and tested to reduce the environmental impacts of tourist accommodation. It focuses on the importance of understanding market segments and their pro-environmental behaviour by exploring the personal and travel characteristics significantly associated with pro-environment beneficial change, empirically investigating hotel guest characteristics associated with higher towel reuse. Towel use per day, per room, is modelled according to the number of adults in the room, the number of children, and the type and origins of guests. Observed actual towel use by 204 travel parties spending 480 nights in a four-star hotel in Slovenia reveals key personal and travel characteristics of hotel guests which are predictive of towel reuse: their country of origin, booking methods used, being a business traveller and not being a family. Results point to a-priori market segments which could be given booking preference in periods of high demand to reduce hotel environmental footprints. Results also point to promising leverage points for interventions designed to modify the behaviour of hotel guests on site. The approach and methodology used could be applied to marketing pro-environmental concepts more widely across other sustainable initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Market segmentation
• towel reuse
• hotels
• pro-environmental behaviour
• Airbnb

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for supporting this research through salary funding under the Discover Scheme project DP110101347 and The University of Queensland for support under the Vice-Chancellor's Research Focused Fellowship and Jim Whyte for enabling the collaboration under the Jim Whyte Fellowship. The authors thank Nazila Babakhani and Homa Hajibaba for feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. Most of all, the authors thank Anze Cokl, the General Manager of Bohinj Park Eco Hotel, for his active involvement in the implementation of this project. Finally, we thank Emil Juvan for pointing us to some interesting work in the area of food waste reduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for supporting this research through salary funding under the Discover Scheme project [DP110101347] and The University of Queensland for support under the Vice-Chancellor's Research Focused Fellowship Programme.

Notes on contributors

Ljubica Knezevic Cvelbar

Ljubica Knezevic Cvelbar is an associate professor of tourism at the University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include sustainable tourism development and tourism economics.

Bettina Grün

Bettina Grün is an associate professor of applied statistics at Johannes Kepler University Linz. Her research interest includes mixture models, statistical computing with R and quantitative marketing.

Sara Dolnicar

Sara Dolnicar is a research professor of tourism at The University of Queensland. Her key research interests are market segmentation methodology and measurement in the social sciences. She has a long-standing interest in sustainable tourism.