The role of environmental and financial concerns in becoming a green hotel

The increasing capacity of the world economy and the tourism sector increases the tendency towards touristic regions and causes density in these regions. As a result of this density in touristic regions, mass tourism in particular has negative effects on natural resources. The negative impact of tourism on the environment shows that resources are consumed quickly and unconsciously. Good planning should be done for sustainable tourism and thus the negative impacts of tourism on the environment should be minimized. Minimizing environmental negativities is perhaps the most important of the social responsibilities of businesses. In order to fulfill these responsibilities, businesses should show environmentally sensitive approaches in the decisions regarding the services they provide and evaluate environmental issues together with the production function. Environmental sensitivity has been increasing rapidly in recent years. Businesses use environmentally sensitive production technologies both to prove their sensitivity to the environment and to meet the demands of their consumers in this direction. One of the important problems that marketing managers may encounter today is that they cannot adapt their product range to the environmentally friendly product demands of consumers and cannot make the necessary changes in this direction. For this purpose, marketing research should be conducted, new marketing strategies should be developed and consumers should be informed and convinced about the environmentally friendly features of the company's products. It is inevitable for businesses to include the environmental dimension of all their activities in their business strategies and long-term plans. Such environmental activities and green marketing are taken into consideration by most businesses. The aim of this study is to contribute to the literature gap regarding green marketing and green hotel management in tourism and to reveal whether the environmentally friendly behaviors of businesses stem from commercial concerns or environmental concerns. In this context, the qualitative research method was used in our study and the findings were obtained through interview technique. The authorities of 9 hotel businesses that receive the "Green Key Label" every year from different regions of Turkey were interviewed via e-mail and telephone. As a result of the research, it was observed that some businesses turned to green hotel activities in order to gain competitive advantage over their competitors in their markets as a result of purely commercial concerns, while some businesses turned to these green hotel activities only due to environmental sustainability concerns, without any commercial purpose.