Examination of Individual Preferences for Green Hotels in Crete

The hospitality sector is experiencing a massive transformation currently. Hotels are currently receiving considerable criticism over their practices concerning energy, environmental, as well as resource management. As a result, managerial practices in the hospitality sector have come under scrutiny. All these developments have given rise to the concept of the ‘smart’ hotel. The smart hotel concept has received considerable attention in the relevant literature in the last few years. However, the majority of this attention has either focused on the technical side (i.e., examining smart hotels from a technological standards perspective), or adopted a rather limited perspective, choosing to focus on specific managerial practices within smart hotels (i.e., environmental management). The current paper aims to address this gap in the literature through the utilization of stated preferences discrete choice modeling methodology. Through this methodology, the paper evaluates tourists’ preferences for a wider range of managerial practices and policies pertaining to smart practices in the hospitality sector. According to the empirical findings, tourists exhibit strong and negative preferences towards the automation of the service delivery process. In addition to that, respondents were very strongly opposed towards hotels without international certification standards for their operations. On the opposite side, tourists expressed very strong and positive preferences towards water management policies (particularly policies aiming to reduce and reuse water resources). Finally, respondents exhibited strong and positive preferences towards different energy-saving technologies within hotels.