Annals of Tourism Research | 2019
Changing service settings for the environment
Abstract
In the European Union alone, cotton serviettes provided to hotel guests at breakfast buffets every day cause carbon emissions equivalent to a car driving around the world 36 times. We test the feasibility of providing less CO2-intensive hotel services without reducing guest satisfaction in a quasi-experiment. We change serviette provision at a 4* hotel from thick cotton serviettes to (less water and CO2-intensive) recycled paper serviettes, while still enabling guests to get a thick cotton serviette. The changed setting reduces cotton serviette use by 95%. Most importantly for industry adoption: guest satisfaction does not drop.