Sustainable practices in the hotel industry

The environmental impacts generated by the tourism and hospitality sector have gained considerable attention from scholars in recent years. Green hotels and sustainable practices have been largely studied as a way to respond to the growing consumers’ environmental awareness and to improve the environmental, social and economic impact of the sector. This growing body of literature uses different points of view, methodologies and theories, also investigating different geographical areas. The aim of this review is to give a comprehensive overview of the academic studies on green hotels research, identify research gaps, and provide potential future research directions on the topic. The paper explores the body of literature on sustainable practices in hotels, revisiting 600 articles, collected through the Scopus databases, and evaluating it using specific structural dimensions to group the selected literature into analytical categories. Several studies reviewed green and sustainability research in hospitality. With respect to past reviews produced by other scholars, this study contains various novelties that provide added value to better understand the topic under investigation. First, it explores the topic with a systematic approach, providing an exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon with rigorous and reproducible research criteria. Second, it includes a wide spectrum of scholars’ publications (600 papers), in comparison with other reviews previously produced and it specifically explores the research about sustainable practices in hotels. Additionally, the investigations on the topic have considerably increased during the last years, and this work provides an updated overview of this research field. Finally, the paper presents the main limitations of the study and identifies opportunities for future research.