Green Practices, Golden Stars: How Hotel Ratings Shape Guests’ Pro-Environmental Behaviour

Hotels invest in sustainability in two very different places. Some green practices are on show — the herb garden, the refillable toiletries, the recycling bin in the room. Others run out of sight, in energy systems, water recycling, and waste plants that guests never see. This study asks a deceptively simple question: does it matter which kind a hotel emphasises, and does the answer depend on the kind of hotel? Across four experiments, it finds that the effectiveness of a green practice is not fixed but contingent on the hotel's star rating, and that the link runs through two distinct kinds of guest well-being.

How the research was done

Grounded in Contingency Theory and Broaden-and-Build Theory, the research comprised a pilot study and four experiments conducted in China. Green practices were sorted into front-of-house (FOH) practices visible to guests and back-of-house (BOH) practices hidden from them, and a pilot with 86 participants selected the five most-recognised practices in each category for use as stimuli. The four studies used a 2×2 between-subjects design crossing practice type (FOH versus BOH) with star rating (luxury versus economy). Studies 1 to 3 were scenario-based online experiments with 185, 225 and 262 participants respectively, testing effects on pro-environmental behaviour and on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, with a moderated-mediation analysis. Study 4 replicated the design with 232 real guests recruited in luxury and economy green hotels in Xiamen, strengthening external validity.

What the research found

The central result is a consistent crossover. In luxury hotels, visible front-of-house practices produced stronger pro-environmental behaviour than back-of-house ones; in economy hotels, the pattern reversed, with hidden back-of-house practices proving more effective. The same interaction held across all four studies, including the field replication with real guests. Star ratings, in other words, do not simply raise or lower guests' engagement with sustainability — they change which type of green practice actually works.

The mechanism lies in two different routes to feeling good. Front-of-house practices in luxury hotels lifted pro-environmental behaviour by enhancing hedonic well-being — the sensory pleasure and gratification of a premium, visibly green experience. Back-of-house practices in economy hotels worked instead through eudaimonic well-being — the sense of meaning and purpose that comes from quietly supporting something worthwhile. Economy guests, more resource-conscious and value-driven, drew satisfaction from knowing their stay supported efficient water use or waste reduction even when nothing was on display. The moderated-mediation analyses confirmed these two distinct pathways, giving the study a dual-mechanism account of how sustainability engages guests.

Insights for the industry

The practical lesson is that there is no single right way to 'go green' in a hotel — the same practice can help or barely register depending on the property. Luxury hotels get the most behavioural return from making sustainability part of the visible, sensory experience: organic dining, biophilic design, eco-friendly amenities that guests can see and enjoy. Economy hotels get more from investing in efficient, behind-the-scenes systems — but because those efforts are invisible, they need to be communicated, through in-room dashboards, signage, or messages that connect a guest's stay to a concrete environmental outcome.

Underlying both is an emotional rather than purely rational route to behaviour. Guests do more for the environment when a practice makes them feel good — pleasurably in the luxury case, meaningfully in the economy case — which suggests sustainability communication should be tuned to the segment rather than standardised. The authors note the usual caveats: the studies were conducted in China and lean on scenario-based designs, so cross-cultural and longer-term field work is needed before the dual-pathway model can be treated as general.