Green marketing applications in tourism businesses: A field survey

Nowadays, companies realize that they can not sustain their companies life without having environmental sensitivity. So companies suppose to consider environment effects of their activities and add them to their strategic plans. That kind of environment activities and marketing strategy that to take note of environment implications are called `green marketing?. Many companies begin to be aware of green marketing perceived as environmentally-sensitive marketing by companies.In this study, relationship between tourism and environment was considered and the concept of green marketing was researched. Following this review, it is discussed in detail how green marketing is implemented in tourism businesses. In this respect, it is firstly mentioned tourism associations providing substantial contribution to tourism businesses and guding them in the process of green marketing and becoming green company. In addition, environment documents which have to be acquired by tourism businesses and the criteria of these documents are touched on. Afterwards, it is tried to figure that how the concept of green marketing is discussed in practice with examples from travel agencies, airlines, food & beverage businesses and hotels.Green hotels applications, which is the formation of implementation of green marketing in hospitality industry, of five stars hotels in Antalya and its surroundings and green marketing perception of their managers are considered in the application part of the study and various analyzes are conducted. In these analyzes, some results have been obtained by associating hotel types, location and working times of their managers in hospitality industry with both their green hotels applications and green marketing perception.According to these results, hotels differ significantly from each other. However, hotels are a similar stance especially about energy and water conservation which is a variety of green hotels applications. The most important reason of this, cost advantage and its effect on profitability is adopted by all managers.