Destinations’ environmental orientation: a symbolic cluster analysis based on hotel employees’ environmental knowledge, awareness, and concern

Abstract

Environmental attitudes (environmental knowledge, awareness, and concern) are important drivers of pro-environmental behaviour for key destination stakeholder groups, including tourists, tourism business staff and residents. However, limited attention has been given to how individual attitudes within each role collectively contribute to the environmental sustainability of tourism destinations.The goal of the study is to fill this gap by conceptually and empirically linking the micro- and macro-levels of analysis, respectively focused on individuals and the destination. First, the concept of Destination Environmental Orientation (DEO) is proposed to indicate the collective attitude of a touristic place or destination towards the environment having micro-foundations in individuals’ cognition, evaluation and affect. Then, focusing on local hotels’ staff as a key destination stakeholder category, the study shows the methodological potential of Symbolic Data Analysis (SDA) to measure DEO based on underlying individual-level data about environmental knowledge, awareness, and concern. Survey-based data are collected among employees in thirty-three hotels located in eleven tourism municipalities of Naples, a province in the Campania region (Italy). The research identifies three groups of tourism municipalities with significant differences in the level of environmental orientation. The findings suggest that these groups exhibit different patterns of functioning and three models are identified based on context-related factors, i.e., the level of tourism developement, the reliance of tourism areas on natural resources, and geograhical and functional proximity among tourism municipalities: the “Mature tourism destination” model, the “Island tourism destination” model, and the “Strategically positioned touristic place” model. The implications to sustainable tourism theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords:

• Environmental knowledge
• environmental awareness
• environmental concern
• pro-environmental behavior
• destination environmental orientation
• symbolic data analysis
• symbolic clustering

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Editor in Chief, prof. Xavier Font, and the three anonymous reviewers of Journal of Sustainable Tourism for their constructive comments and valuable suggestions. A special thank to Associazione Direttori d’Albergo Campania, Federalberghi Naples, Federalberghi Sorrento, Federalberghi Ischia, Federalberghi Capri, Antonino Esposito (Hotels & Restaurants Zero Waste) and all hotel owners and managers who supported data collection.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.