Abstract
Despite extensive discussion of environmental management for hotels, little research has been done on the hotel industry’s green supply chain management. This study uses the evolutionary game approach to examine the generation of green behaviors and a green supply chain by hotels. Results show that most hotels do have an incentive mechanism for green growth; hotels with green behaviors are more profitable than those that are not. Furthermore, governments and hotel customers are critical in the “greening” of traditional hotel supply chains. The findings can assist governments in formulating effective environmental policies, provide a theoretical avenue in governing green practice, and guide stakeholders to understand the formation and evolution of green development in the hotel industry.
1. Introduction
Environmental sustainability has become a vital guide to the development of a code of sustainable organizational practices (Wang et al., 2013). The hotel industry is a people industry. In such a dynamic industry, collaboration with stakeholders can lead a hotel to a more sustainable future (Xu and Gursoy, 2015). A stakeholder is defined as “any group (or individual) who can affect or be affected by the achievement of the objectives of an organization” (Freeman, 2010). The key stakeholder groups in a hotel are internal (e.g., employees and managers) and external (e.g., customers, competitors, suppliers). The suppliers-inputs-process- outputs-customers (SIPOC) diagram was used to explain the hotel supply chain from the beginning (suppliers) to end (customers) (Al-Aomar and Hussain, 2017) (Fig. 1).
6. Conclusion, limitations and directions for future research
Our findings lead to two conclusions. Green supply chain management is an efficient way to improve an entity’s competitiveness (Zhu and Sarkis, 2004), especially in the hotel industry. A dynamic analysis demonstrates that a hotel’s attitude toward “green” has a significant effect on its revenue; in other words, hotels that adopt green behaviors reap higher benefits than hotels that do not.
