The Business of Green Hotels in an Emerging Economy: Role of Greenwashing and Mindfulness

The investigation examines the predicting capacities of two variables; greenwashing effect and mindfulness toward green hotel intention. A total of 120 individuals were subjected to a psychometric evaluation onsite India’s first planned eco-tourism zone known as Thenmala. The study deploys a PLS-SEM architecture to expound the relationship among the variables in question. It is revealed through the bootstrapping algorithm output that mindfulness has a positive and significant association with green hotel intention. This further exposes the fact that the subjects consider themselves at the center of their environment and display biospheric values. This research is a stepping stone toward excavating sustainable solutions for the hotel industry in the world’s third largest polluting country having the fourth largest carbon emission due to tourism. This study contributes to the existing literature by diversifying the usage of two novel variables in the context of green purchase intention. The study answers the call to action by pertinent authors to empirically test aversive and self-reflective aspects of guest behavior when selecting hotels. The study advises hotel operators and executives to augment their offerings to appeal to the emerging genre of eco-sensitive tourists. Future studies are recommended to inquire upon the goal forming behavior of tourists intending to consume green hotels.