Online ISSN: 2515-8260

A Study on customer attitude and its business impact towards green initiates by restaurants

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Priyam Prateek, Dr VanishreePabalkar

Abstract

Hotel industry is a one of biggest user of single use food packaging products in form of straws, spoons, cups, plates, carry-bags and containers etc. Plastic products were cheap and durable. But this comes at serious environmental costs with clogging of landfills and waterways with these plastic wasters. Plastics are also a biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its life cycle from production to ways it is managed as waste product. Polystyrene type which is most common plastic used in single use food packaging products are also harmful to human health. With increasing environmental awareness, there is move towards reduction of single use plastics in hotel industry all over the world. Many hotel operators have made efforts to reduce single use plastics such as straws, carry bags, spoons etc. They have switched to forks and spoons made from bamboo and straws made from paper. Some of hotel operator has even made this green initiative as a hallmark of their brand identity. Green initiative comes with a problem of additional cost which finally has to be borne by the customers. The additional cost can also be deterrent towards the green initiatives by the hotel operators, as there is a high chance of customer churn or it can also be a major brand recall factor which can bring additional business to the hotel operators. The attitude of customer cannot be same across the country as there is wide spread income disparity and additional cost can be perceived differently in tier-1 and tier-2 cites. This work attempts to study the customer attitude towards green initiatives by the hotel industry in reducing the single use plastics. The study also answers the questions related to business outcomes for the hotel operators towards green initiatives. The study is conducted using a structured questionnaire response from tier-1 and tier-2 city respondents. Through the questionnaire responses, correlation between the green initiatives and business value to the hotel operators and the attitude of customers towards the additional cost of green effort are analysed.

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