State of Incentivizing property-level environmental sustainability in the U.S. hotel industry

Despite myriad industries increasingly incorporating environmental sustainability metrics into their management incentive programs, there has been little focus on hoteliers' incentivization of environmental sustainability metrics within the hospitality literature. This study, therefore, surveyed 56 hotel management firms in the United States representing 18,961 hotel properties to determine if they are currently incentivizing environmental sustainability initiatives among their property-level general managers (GMs) compared to more common incentives associated with financial performance. Findings reveal that nearly all firms incentivize GMs around financial results [96 %], guest satisfaction performance metrics [91 %], and operational performance metrics [71 %], such as goals related to employee turnover rates. However, this study finds that only 17 % of the firms currently incentivize their GMs with metrics focused on environmental sustainability. Despite this low percentage of hotel companies not currently incentivizing environmental sustainability, results show hotel companies are open to the idea of incentivizing environmental sustainability, with 51 % being either “likely” or “very likely” to begin doing so if such environmental sustainability initiatives could be monitored by a mystery shopper, a brand inspector, or through guest surveys. Therefore, the implications section offers specific directions on how such adoption can be operationalized.