Tourism Management 103 (2024) 104893

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Tourism Management
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tourman

Are publicly traded tourism and hospitality providers greenwashing?

Giorgos E. Papagiannakis a, Pavlos A. Vlachos b, Christos D. Koritos c, *, George I. Kassinis d
a
Department of Economics, University of Peloponnese, 22100, Tripolis, Greece
b
The Theodore Papalexopoulos Chair in Sustainability, Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece, 6–8, Xenias, 115 28, Athens, Greece
c
Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of Greece, 6–8, Xenias, 115 28, Athens, Greece
d
Department of Business and Public Administration, University of Cyprus, Cyprus, 1 Panepistimiou Avenue, CY-1678, Nicosia, Cyprus

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Greenwashing refers to a practice where firms try to earn undeserved moral credits by not “walking” their
Greenwashing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) “talk.” Tourism and hospitality providers have long been accused of
Environmental claims greenwashing. However, despite the importance of greenwashing for the industry, we still lack ecologically valid
Environmental actions
evidence on the extent to which a) tourism and hospitality providers greenwash and b) whether customers
Tourism
penalize tourism and hospitality providers for greenwashing. To address this gap, we use an objective, theory-
driven, granular, and comparable (across sub-sectors) greenwashing measure for 253 traded tourism and hos­
pitality firms for the period 2004–2017. For the years 2018–2022, due to missing data, we show the state of
greenwashing using an abbreviated measure. In contrast to greenwashing research published in this journal and
elsewhere, we show that—on average—providers across all major tourism and hospitality sectors do not
greenwash. However, the ones that do, experience a significant sales drop.

1. Introduction
CSR communication has become a topic of increasing interest among
tourism and hospitality scholars (Majeed & Kim, 2023). A key theme
revealed in this literature is customers’ concerns over the true motives
behind the environmental initiatives that tourism and hospitality pro­
viders communicate (Buckley, 2013). More specifically, customers have
difficulty distinguishing whether communicated CSR actions (e.g., towel
reuse) represent window-dressing for their true aim, which is the
reduction of operating costs. Many refer to this as greenwashing, a phe­
nomenon by which firms over-communicate their CSR aspirations or
endeavors to be perceived as more responsible (environmentally or so­
cially) than their actual CSR practices may justify (Kim & Lyon, 2015).
Conceptually, greenwashing represents a moral inconsistency phenom­
enon whereby firms try to earn an undeserved moral benefit by
appearing more sustainable than they really are (see Effron & Helgason,
2023).
Although greenwashing appears to be a very salient issue in business
practice and public policy (Melloni, Patacconi, & Vikander, 2023),
scholarly research has yet to offer externally valid evidence on the actual
prevalence or diffusion of the phenomenon in business practice and also
the extent to which there is a market mechanism that can, at least
partially, address it by penalizing implicated firms. This lack of research
on greenwashing, its diffusion, and consequences, appears to be espe­
cially profound in tourism and hospitality, where, paradoxically, the
greenwashing neologism has been originally used (Seele & Gatti, 2017).
At the same time, perhaps owing to different definitions and meth­
odologies employed to study greenwashing, the tourism and hospitality
literature is fragmented, offering mixed evidence on the implications of
greenwashing. For example, Rahman et al. (2015) demonstrate that
customers perceiving an ulterior motive in a hotel’s environmental
claims are less willing to participate in environmental conservation ef­
forts and less likely to revisit it. However, recent research also suggests
that CSR communications within tourism and hospitality are welcomed
by customers and are less likely to be perceived as greenwashing. For
example, Ettinger et al. (2021) find that hotel guests hold positive atti­
tudes toward both one and two-way CSR communications and that
tourism and hospitality firms should not greenhush (i.e.,
under-communicate) but instead explicitly communicate their CSR
efforts.
Perhaps the first effort to systematically examine greenwashing
within tourism and hospitality is Font et al.’s (2012) study of the extent

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: papagiannakis@uop.gr (G.E. Papagiannakis), pvlachos@alba.acg.edu (P.A. Vlachos), ckoritos@alba.acg.edu (C.D. Koritos), kassinis@ucy.ac.cy
(G.I. Kassinis).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2024.104893
Received 30 March 2023; Received in revised form 17 January 2024; Accepted 18 January 2024
Available online 31 January 2024
0261-5177/© 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
G.E. Papagiannakis et al.
Table 1
Greenwashinga scores by tourism and hospitality sub-sectors.
# of firms Talk Walk Greenwashing
Hotels & Motels 55 0.20 0.27 − 0.07
Restaurants 65 0.23 0.37 − 0.14
Amusement & Recreation 35 0.20 0.20 0.00
Tourist Transportation 98 0.28 0.34 − 0.06
Tourism & Hospitality 253 0.25 0.32 − 0.07
Note: Talk and Walk range between 0 (low) and 1 (high). Greenwashing ranges
between − 1 and 1.
a
33% of firm-year observations fall into the greenwashing classification,
while in the rest of the cases we observe either consistency (talk = walk; 9%) or
greenhushing (walk > talk; 58%).
to which CSR reports published by global hotel chains correspond to
what researchers experienced in their onsite visits to a sample of these
hotels. They found a misalignment between what hotel chains say and
do regarding various aspects of CSR. More recently, employing a content
analytic approach, Guix et al. (2022) ranked several airline agencies in
terms of the misleadingness and trustworthiness of their voluntary car­
bon offsetting claims, providing additional evidence on the green­
washing practices of those providers.
Despite their important contribution to the study of greenwashing,
these studies suffer from three limitations, which we try to address in
this research. First, they focus on a single tourism and hospitality sector
(i.e., hotels or airlines). Notwithstanding the sectors that the above two
studies examine, we have very limited knowledge about the extent of
greenwashing in other tourism and hospitality sectors, including res­
taurants, amusement and recreation, as well as several means of tourist
transportation. Providing rigorous evidence on the extent of green­
washing across tourism and hospitality sectors facilitates comparative
insight.
Second, both studies are cross-sectional, observing greenwashing
only for a limited time span. However, exploring the evolution of
greenwashing over time is important for a) evaluating the sector’s self-
regulation efforts and b) estimating in a more rigorous and externally
valid manner the effect of greenwashing on customers and, critically, on
firm sales. Indeed, this represents the third limitation of both Font et al.
(2012) and Guix et al. (2022), who, although they observe higher levels
of greenwashing in their sample, do not offer any evidence regarding the
financial performance effects of such practices. Although there is
research on the antecedents of greenwashing (e.g., He et al., 2022), what
is missing is externally valid empirical evidence on the extent to which
greenwashing in tourism and hospitality is penalized by important
stakeholders, like customers.
This research note seeks to address these limitations namely a) the
dearth of research on the extent to which large tourism and hospitality
providers are greenwashing and, thus, whether they are ready to address
regulatory challenges such as the Green Claims Directive, b) whether
customers penalize such behavior through actual purchases (and not
purchase intentions), and c) the lack of a standardized theory-based
measure to measure greenwashing across time and tourism and hospi­
tality sectors. In so doing our work has several strengths: a) it uses data
from multiple secondary (and, thus, more objective) sources; b) it
operationalizes greenwashing in a more comparable manner across
firms (i.e., same items for all companies) by adopting a novel
theoretically-driven measure that builds on recent management work
(Kassinis et al., 2022) and established sociological research on the
so-called policy-practice divide (Bromley & Powell, 2012), namely the
idea that we can operationalize greenwashing as the difference between
companies’ environmental actions (“walk”) and claims (“talk”). In other
words, greenwashing occurs when there is a perception of deliberate,
strategic deviation between firms’ CSR “walk” and “talk”; c) it provides a
comparison of greenwashing across four tourism and hospitality sectors;
d) it employs an instrumental variables technique to minimize potential
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Tourism Management 103 (2024) 104893
endogeneity issues; and e) it relies on a large panel data set that con­
siders the evolution of the greenwashing phenomenon across time.
In summary, we use a more objective 14-year longitudinal dataset,
comparable theoretically driven measurements, and rigorous statistical
techniques to provide, perhaps for the first time, empirical evidence
about the following questions: a) to what extent do firms across all four
major tourism and hospitality sectors greenwash and b) whether
greenwashing is penalized by customers, as this is proxied by lower
actual firm sales. By addressing these questions, our work contributes to
theory and public policy, showing that besides institutional efforts to
curb greenwashing (He et al., 2022; Marquis et al., 2016), there is also a
market mechanism capable of reducing greenwashing (He et al., 2022;
Marquis et al., 2016).
2. Method and results
2.1. Sample
Our sample comprises 253 publicly traded firms (see Appendix for a
complete list of the sample firms) operating in all major tourism and
hospitality sectors (Dogru et al., 2022) covered by Refinitiv. To identify
the appropriate sectors, we used the 4-digit SIC codes. Refinitiv provides
objective, auditable, and comparable (across industries) CSR data that
analysts collect from multiple publicly available sources, such as annual
reports, company and NGO websites, stock exchange filings, and news
sources. We used all available information from 2004 to 2017, which is
the year the database stopped collecting several essential data points to
measure the (theoretically driven) independent variable. To show the
state of greenwashing in more recent years (, i.e., 2018–2022), we
constructed an abbreviated measure of greenwashing using any avail­
able information. We collected financial and accounting data from
WorldScope. The final sample includes 1573 firm-year observations.
2.2. Measures
Drawing from work on moral inconsistency (Effron & Helgason,
2023), we define greenwashing as a form of (stakeholder) perceived
intentional deception whereby firms try to earn an undeserved moral
benefit by utilizing more CSR policies, namely “soft” claims whose
implementation is hard to verify, relative to CSR practices, namely
“hard” information whose implementation can be verified (Bonilla-P­
riego et al., 2014). In this respect, greenwashing was operationalized as
the discrepancy between a firm’s use of CSR policies (CSR “talk”) versus
the use of CSR practices (CSR “walk”) (Ioannou et al., 2023). Adopting
the broader definition of greenwashing that refers to both green and
social dimensions of CSR, we considered all available datapoints from
the green product innovation and product responsibility categories of
Refinitiv that correspond to the environmental and social facets of
product sustainability (Kassinis et al., 2022). We focused on product (or
service) sustainability to ensure that our measure captures initiatives
observable by consumers thus affecting their purchase behavior and
firm sales, our key dependent variable. Examples of datapoints related to
the “talk” dimension of greenwashing include questions about whether a
firm has an environmental or a safety product policy. Respectively,
datapoints that capture the “walk” dimension of greenwashing include
questions about whether a firm implements programs to minimize its
energy usage (see the Appendix for the datapoints used and real-life
examples of policies and actions from selected tourism and hospitality
companies).
All datapoints are in the form of “no” or “yes”. Accordingly, we coded
them as 0 or 1. Then, we calculated a normalized aggregation score for
each dimension (“talk” and “walk”) on a 0–1 scale. Greenwashing was
calculated as the discrepancy between the two scores (“talk” – “walk”).
The higher the score, the higher the greenwashing; the lower the score,
the more firms greenhush.
To measure the dependent variable, sales, we used the natural
G.E. Papagiannakis et al. Tourism Management 103 (2024) 104893

Fig. 1. How firms in tourism and hospitality (and their subsector) “talk” and “walk” their CSR across time. Note that Refinitiv stopped collecting several datapoints
used to measure greenwashing. Using all available datapoints and adopting an analytic approach (described in the Appendix), we computed an abbreviated measure of
greenwashing for 2018–2022. Dashed lines indicate the score of this measure.

logarithm of firms’ sales consistent with past research (e.g., Lev et al.,
2010). Furthermore, in our econometric models, we included year
dummies, firms’ size (log of total assets), R&D (R&D/total assets), SGA
(selling, general, and administrative expenses/total assets), debt (total
debt/equity book value), Capital Expenditures, and Market Capitalization
(market price-year end x common shares outstanding). In the cases of
R&D and SGA, missing values were replaced by zeros, and two dummy
variables (R&D_d and SGA_d) were added to the equation to identify
these instances (Lev et al., 2010).
2.3. Analysis and results
To remove ex-ante potential endogeneity effects (Antonakis et al.,
2010), we used an instrumental variable (IV) design for panel data with
fixed effects. We created two instruments (Cheng et al., 2014): a) the
first instrument captures the extent of greenwashing of firms that belong
to the same country and sector as the focal firm, and b) the second in­
strument captures the extent of greenwashing of firms that belong to the
same country as the focal firm, also taking into account the year of
reference. The values of the various scores we computed (F-test of the
joint significance, Kleibergen-Paap rk LM statistic, and Kleibergen-Paap
Wald rk F statistic) ensure the validity of the two instruments (detailed

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G.E. Papagiannakis et al. Tourism Management 103 (2024) 104893

Table 2
Pearson correlations and descriptive statistics (N = 1573).
Variables 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

1 Sales 1
2 Greenwashing − 0.08** 1
3 Size 0.59** 0.05** 1
4 R&D 0.10** − 0.01 0.01 1
5 R&D_d 0.05** 0.13*** 0.01 0.12*** 1
6 SGA − 0.09*** − 0.14*** − 0.27*** − 0.01 0.13*** 1
7 SGA_d 0.05** − 0.12*** − 0.06** 0.02 0.05* 0.37*** 1
8 Debt 0.04* 0.02** 0.05** 0.01 − 0.01 0.01 0.01 1
9 Capital Expenditures 0.88*** − 0.04 0.62*** 0.09*** 0.02 − 0.18*** − 0.01 0.06*** 1
10 Market Capitalization 0.84*** − 0.02 0.45*** 0.11*** 0.09*** − 0.17*** 0.02 0.01 0.80*** 1

Mean 15.37 − 0.07 15.16 0.04 0.09 0.16 0.76 1.25 12.74 15.67
SD 2.05 0.18 1.39 1.13 0.29 0.24 0.43 14.94 2.39 1.98
Min 8.85 − 0.75 11.12 0 0 0 0 − 225.83 5.49 8.11
Max 24.06 0.43 17.75 44.05 1 4.56 1 491.85 21.28 23.87

Note. *p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.

firm and fewer purchases (Palmatier et al., 2006). The role of tour op­
Table 3 erators, who increasingly consider CSR a prerequisite for doing more
Results of the IV panel regressions. business with tourism and hospitality providers (Masiero et al., 2023),
Model 1 DV: Model 2 DV: Decomposition of should be emphasized here. These professional (i.e.,
Greenwashing Greenwashing into Talk and Business-to-Business) customers, who play a critical role in the mar­
Walk keting of tourism and hospitality services, are more likely to be able (and
Coef. SE Coef. SE willing) to scrutinize tourism and hospitality providers’ CSR “talk”
Greenwashing − 0.202** (0.092)
versus “walk” and, in turn, penalize them when the former exceeds the
Talk − 0.004 (0.141) latter, signaling greenwashing and in turn lower integrity.
Walk 0.357*** (0.111)
3. Discussion
Size 0.657*** (0.067) 0.617*** (0.067)
R&D − 0.003*** (0.001) − 0.003*** (0.001)
R&D_d 0.118 (0.080) 0.118 (0.080) In contrast to work published in this journal and elsewhere (e.g.,
SGA 0.572*** (0.070) 0.564*** (0.069) Font et al., 2012; Guix et al., 2022), we demonstrate, perhaps for the first
SGA_d − 0.082 (0.060) − 0.081 (0.060) time, that large providers across all major tourism and hospitality sec­
Debt − 0.001 (0.001) 0.001 (0.001) tors appear to have engaged in more CSR “walk” than “talk” for most of
Cap_ex 0.056** (0.023) 0.055** (0.023)
Market Capitalization 0.095*** (0.028) 0.098*** (0.028)
the 14 years we observe. This finding offers an important managerial
Year dummies YES YES implication: tourism and hospitality face fewer reputational and litiga­
Observationsa 1560 1560 tion risks stemming from greenwashing and appear to be making CSR
F-test 23.14*** 22.75*** claims they can substantiate. It seems that at least the larger tourism and
*p < 0.10; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01. hospitality providers are already taking steps to comply with green­
washing regulations (such as the EU’s Green Claims Directive) and
statistics are available by the authors). conform with social preferences for lower greenwashing.
Table 1 reports the greenwashing scores (and the score of its two Specifically, as shown in Fig. 1, the hospitality and restaurant sub­
components, “talk” and “walk”) by the tourism and hospitality sub- sectors have been the first to shift their efforts towards CSR imple­
sector. Fig. 1 shows the evolution of these scores across time. Table 2 mentation (i.e., “walk”) compared to CSR communication (i.e., “talk”),
reports descriptive statistics and correlations. The variance inflation followed by tourism transportation (i.e., airlines, cruises, etc.). Interest­
factor (VIF) takes values from 1.03 to 3.83, indicating that our data do ingly, the amusement and recreation sectors have been the last to expe­
not suffer from multicollinearity. We also ran our models excluding the rience such a shift. Our results seem to corroborate the findings of
two control variables with a relatively high correlation with the Bonilla-Priego, Font, and Pacheco-Olivares (2014) from cruise com­
dependent variable (i.e., Capital Expenditures and Market Capitaliza­ panies’ CSR reporting, whereby firms at the early stages of CSR
tion), and the results did not change significantly. reporting were more likely to communicate management rather than
Table 3 shows the outcome of the IV regressions. As Model 1 shows, performance information. Importantly, results urge against green­
greenwashing has a significantly negative effect on sales (b = − 0.202, washing because this leads to negative customer responses (sales), a
SE = 0.092, p < 0.05). As shown in Model 2, implementing green finding corroborated by the strong and positive effect that CSR imple­
practices (i.e., “walk”) enhances sales, while communication (i.e., mentation (“walk”) has on customer responses (sales). In other words,
“talk”) does not influence sales. Thus, it seems that it is the discrepancy besides moral motivations, there seems to be a business case against
between “talk” and “walk” per se (as proxied by the greenwashing greenwashing (or in favor of greenhushing).
variable)—and not the direct effects of “talk” and “walk”— that drives Future research should explore antecedents of the greenhushing
lower sales. Our findings can be explained by past marketing research. In evidence that we uncovered in this research. For example, what is the
particular, we argue that the negative effect of greenwashing on firm role of regulation (i.e., litigation risks) and/or competition (Park et al.,
sales can be explained by lower firm trustworthiness. Greenwashing is 2017) in driving more CSR “walk” than “talk” in tourism and other in­
commonly perceived as an attempt by a firm to mislead customer­ dustries? A limitation of our sample is that it includes only larger,
s—including tour operators—into believing that the firm is more socio- publicly traded firms. Although we a) account for firm size when esti­
environmentally responsible than it really is (Lyon & Montgomery, mating the effect of greenwashing on sales, b) report a positive rela­
2015). This perception harms the integrity dimension of firm trust­ tionship between greenwashing and firm size (see Table 2), and c) there
worthiness (Kassinis et al., 2022), leading to lower engagement with the is a healthy size variation in the sampled firms, the extent to which small
and medium-sized enterprises, in particular, greenhush or greenwash is

4
G.E. Papagiannakis et al.
an important avenue for future research. Finally, although we adopt an
instrumental variables methodology, we cannot make causal claims
about the relationship of our variables. Future studies could employ
experimental designs to further address endogeneity issues.
Impact statement
Greenwashing is a salient form of organizational misconduct by
which tourism and hospitality firms try to earn undeserved moral credits
from society. They do so by misrepresenting themselves as more socially
and environmentally responsible than they actually are. Importantly, it
represents a threat toward the aspired transition of tourism and hospi­
tality firms to stakeholder capitalism and, in turn, toward achieving the
UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To tackle the threat of
greenwashing in tourism and hospitality, we need ways to measure it
longitudinally, observe whether it is happening, and, if so, whether it’s
getting better or worse over time. In this milieu, this research contrib­
utes by measuring the extent to which tourism and hospitality firms
greenwash and, thus, the extent to which these sectors of the economy
are genuinely committed to achieving SDGs. Broadly, this research of­
fers tools and evidence that can be longitudinally leveraged to spot
potential tourism and hospitality greenwashers and push them towards
more sustainable pathways.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Giorgos E. Papagiannakis: Writing – original draft, Methodology,
Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Pav­
los A. Vlachos: Writing – original draft, Investigation, Conceptualiza­
tion. Christos D. Koritos: Writing – original draft, Investigation.
George I. Kassinis: Writing – original draft, Investigation, Data cura­
tion, Conceptualization.
Declaration of competing interest
None.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.tourman.2024.104893.
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Giorgos Papagiannakis (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of
Entrepreneurship and Sustainability at the University of Pelo­
ponnese (Greece). His research interests are in the areas of
Corporate Social Responsibility, Entrepreneurship, and Inno­
vation. He is a member of the Editorial Review Board at the
Journal of Business Research. His work appears in the Journal
of Management Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Harvard
Business Review and British Journal of Management among
others.
Pavlos A. Vlachos (Ph.D) is the Theodore Papalexopoulos Chair
in Sustainability and Associate Professor of Marketing at Alba
Graduate Business School (AGBS), The American College of
Greece His current research interests include (macro and
micro) Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and organiza­
tional social evaluations (organizational reputation, organiza­
tional stigma). He serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal
of Business Research (Sustainability/Ethics). His work has
appeared in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management
Studies, Human Relations, Journal of Organizational Behavior,
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of
Business Research among others.
G.E. Papagiannakis et al.
Christos Koritos (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Marketing at
the Alba Graduate Business School, The American College of
Greece. His research focuses on services marketing, tourism
and hospitality management, and consumer behavior. His
research appears, among others, in the Tourism Management,
Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Product Innovation Man­
agement, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality
Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising,
European Journal of Marketing.
Tourism Management 103 (2024) 104893
George Kassinis (PhD) is a professor of strategic management
in the Department of Business & Public Administration of the
University of Cyprus and a faculty affiliate of the University of
Pennsylvania’s Identity & Conflict Lab. His current research
focuses on greenwashing, sustainability in the global extractive
industries and the intersection of political conflict, stakeholder
networks, and the role of business in peace building. His
research has been published in journals including The Academy
of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of
Management Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, and Harvard
Business Review. He was educated at Princeton, MIT, and
Cornell.