Marketing of environmentally friendly hotels in China through religious segmentation: a theory of planned behaviour approach

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between religiosity, green purchase attitude (GPA), subjective norm (SN), perceived behavioural control (PBC) and green purchase intention (GPI) towards the selection of environmentally friendly hotel. The current study argues that consumers’ incentive variable, namely, religiosity, can influence consumers’ environmentally friendly hotel selection. Design/methodology/approach This study had successfully gathered 404 completed questionnaire sets through online surveys. All survey data were subjected to descriptive analysis and analysis of variance using SPSS. Besides that, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were performed for the testing of hypotheses. Findings The results suggest that religiosity significantly and positively influences GPA, SN, PBC and GPI. Furthermore, GPA and PBC positively and significantly influence GPI. The SN also displays significant positive influence on GPA, while GPA plays a full mediation role between SN and GPI. In addition, statistically significant differences in religiosity, SN and PBC were obtained between religious affiliations of consumers towards environmentally friendly hotel selection. Originality/value This study extended the existing knowledge based on the selection of environmentally friendly hotels among religious consumers in the tourism literature. Besides that, these empirical findings would greatly benefit hotel managers and other key stakeholders in the tourism industry.

The Impact of Tourists’ Perceptions of Space-launch Tourism: An Extension of the Theory of Planned Behavior Approach

“…Researchers have widely used and adapted the TPB model to predict tourists' intentions in various tourism marketing literature, such as visa exemption travel (Han et al, 2011), green hotel selection (Wang & Wong, 2020;Wang & Zhang, 2020), religious tourism (Wang et al, 2020c), destination visit intention (Soliman, 2019), and many others. The core of TPB supports intention as the most important antecedent of behavior, whereby Wang (2020) has described intention as an individual's cognitive motivation to utilize effort in performing a specific behavior.…”

“…According to Wang et al (2020a), attitude can be described as the extent to which an individual has a positive or negative evaluation of a given behavior. It reflects one's psychological evaluation process of a specific product or service when he/she engages with it within a certain purchasing behavior (Wang & Wong, 2020). It can represent an individual's consistently favorable or unfavorable evaluation, tendencies and feelings toward any particular thought or behavior (Wang et al, 2019).…”

“…Numerous studies on tourism marketing have shown how SN positively influences intention and behavior (Liu et al, 2020;Wang & Wong, 2020). Wang and Wong (2020) adopted the TPB model and found that SN positively affected intention in the context of environmentally friendly hotel selection. Kim and Kim (2018) found that the SN positively affected intention toward food festival attendees among U.S consumers.…”

“…Some scholars suggested that one's positive or negative views or perceived conceptions of novel products or service are influenced by significant referents (e.g., close-friends, relatives, colleagues). This can lead to a favorable or unfavorable attitude, which result in a high or low intention in highly collectivistic countries (e.g., China, Korea, Japan) (Wang & Wong, 2020;Wang et al, 2019). This corresponds to Bashir et al (2019)'s view that although the existing practices within TPB does not confirm any role of mediation among its principle-independent constructs, the possibility of mediation cannot be ignored in some circumstances.…”

“…The theory of planned behavior model (TPB) is one of most popular theories to predict an individual's intention in various tourism studies (Soliman, 2019;Wang & Wong, 2020). Unfortunately, there is no research that has applied the TPB in explaining a tourist's decision-making process by considering its relationship with other critical underlying factors that form a tourist's intention toward space-launch tourism.…”