Moderating role of greenwashing perceptions in predicting tourists' intention to visit green hotels

This study aimed to find what factors determined tourists' intention to visit green hotels. More importantly, it aimed to investigate whether tourists' greenwashing perceptions played a negative moderating role in visit intention formation. As the theoretical framework, this study adopted The Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), and extended the original model by including perceived greenwashing as a moderator. An online survey was administered via Google Forms and yielded 392 complete responses. Findings showed that subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and personal norm were main determinants of intention to visit green hotels, with personal norm having the largest influence on intention. Attitude towards green hotels and perceived greenwashing were not found to have a significant impact on intention. Findings also demonstrated that perceived greenwashing significantly weakened the attitude – intention relationship while significantly strengthening the perceived behavioral control – intention relationship. Finally, between-group comparisons indicated that tourists who belonged to different age and income groups and those with different educational backgrounds significantly differed in their intention to visit green hotels. While tourists with prior green hotel experience significantly differed in their intention than those without green hotel experience, males and females were not found to differ than each other in this manner.