The Green Image in the Spanish Hotel Sector: Analysis of Its Consequences from a Relational Perspective
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Initially, the paper suffers from the TMGT effect (Too Much of a Good Thing).
I disagree with authors when they say : hotel chains and their marketers must im-19 prove their green image through the correct design of activities, actions, and strategies with the aim 20 to increase trust, satisfaction, and loyalty of their clients. It will depend on strategy plans of each hotel or organization.
Furthermore, I am concerned about a updated papers in this current topic. We are in 2021, I am confident that authors can collected more information and updated data from the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) of Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science (WOS, 2021). I attach image.
I suggest to authors some papers like:
Florido-Benítez, L. (2020). Aeropuerto de Sevilla: un éxito de buena gestión de relación e interoperabilidad en la mejora de la conectividad aérea. Revista de Turismo Estudos e Prácticas, 5(2), 1-30.
The importance of green practices for hotel guests: does gender matter? Moise, MS (Moise, Mihaela Simona); Gil-Saura, I (Gil-Saura, Irene) ; Molina, MER (Ruiz Molina, Maria Eugenia) 2021. The effects of hotel green business practices on consumers' loyalty intentions: an expanded multidimensional service model in the upscale segment By:Assaker, G (Assaker, Guy) 2020.INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT Volume: 13, Issue: 12, Pages: 3787-3807
DOI: 10.1108/IJCHM-05-2020-0461; Published: DEC 13 2020
I don not see about implications of DMOs in this topic. Furthermore, I am confident that readers of sustainability and young researchers would like to see some examples of this topic such as figures or images. It is very important to stage your paper and it makes easier for us to have a global vision of this research.
The methodology, analysis of data and results are correct and interesting. Finally, I liked the structure in Discussion, practical implications, research limitations and the future research directions.
In general, this paper has improved according to reviewers.
Congrat!
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
April 19, 2021
Dear Sir/Madam,
Many thanks again for your second revision and constructive comments on our manuscript.
We are delighted to inform you that we have made the latest modifications on basis of your comments, and they are the following:
- Specified applied survey fieldwork during the pandemic caused by Covid-19 in Spain in June/July 2020.
- Improved practical implications in related to the comment made by reviewer: “I disagree with authors when they say : hotel chains and their marketers must im-19 prove their green image through the correct design of activities, actions, and strategies with the aim 20 to increase trust, satisfaction, and loyalty of their clients. It will depend on strategy plans of each hotel or organization”.
- Added and integrated latest scientific publications related to the research topic and suggested by the reviewer:
Han H, Chen C, Lho LH, Kim H, Yu J. (2020) Green Hotels: Exploring the Drivers of Customer Approach Behaviors for Green Consumption. Sustainability. 12(21):9144. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219144
Mihaela Simona Moise, Irene Gil-Saura & María Eugenia Ruiz Molina (2021): The importance of green practices for hotel guests: does gender matter?, Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, DOI: 10.1080/1331677X.2021.1875863
Hu X, Danso BA, Mensah IA, Addai M. (2020) Does Innovation Type Influence Firm Performance? A Dilemma of Star-Rated Hotels in Ghana. Sustainability. 12(23):9912. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12239912
Foris D, Crihalmean N, Foris T. (2020) Exploring the Environmental Practices in Hospitality through Booking Websites and Online Tourist Reviews. Sustainability. 12(24):10282. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122410282
Feyers S, Stein T, Klizentyte K. (2020) Bridging Worlds: Utilizing a Multi-Stakeholder Framework to Create Extension–Tourism Partnerships. Sustainability. 12(1):80. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010080
- Included DMOs implication for the green brand image creation and added Figure 2 in Appendix E as example in relation to this topic.
With all your suggested improvements, we hope that our manuscript will be published in the prestigious journal Sustainability in the nearest future.
With the best regards,
Prof. Rebeca Antolin,
José Ramón Sarmiento Guede and
Arta Antonovica
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear author/s,
the topic of the paper is interesting for the audience of the journal. However, I think you should clarify a bit the information related to the period when the survey was applied since it is known that during 2020 there were restrictions regarding tourism activity.
Good luck!
Author Response
April 19, 2021
Dear Sir/Madam,
Many thanks again for your second revision and constructive comments on our manuscript.
We are delighted to inform you that we have made the latest modifications on basis of your comments, and they are the following:
- Specified applied survey fieldwork during the pandemic caused by Covid-19 in Spain in June/July 2020.
- Improved practical implications in related to the comment made by reviewer: “I disagree with authors when they say : hotel chains and their marketers must im-19 prove their green image through the correct design of activities, actions, and strategies with the aim 20 to increase trust, satisfaction, and loyalty of their clients. It will depend on strategy plans of each hotel or organization”.
- Added and integrated latest scientific publications related to the research topic and suggested by the reviewer:
Han H, Chen C, Lho LH, Kim H, Yu J. (2020) Green Hotels: Exploring the Drivers of Customer Approach Behaviors for Green Consumption. Sustainability. 12(21):9144. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219144
Mihaela Simona Moise, Irene Gil-Saura & María Eugenia Ruiz Molina (2021): The importance of green practices for hotel guests: does gender matter?, Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, DOI: 10.1080/1331677X.2021.1875863
Hu X, Danso BA, Mensah IA, Addai M. (2020) Does Innovation Type Influence Firm Performance? A Dilemma of Star-Rated Hotels in Ghana. Sustainability. 12(23):9912. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12239912
Foris D, Crihalmean N, Foris T. (2020) Exploring the Environmental Practices in Hospitality through Booking Websites and Online Tourist Reviews. Sustainability. 12(24):10282. https://doi.org/10.3390/su122410282
Feyers S, Stein T, Klizentyte K. (2020) Bridging Worlds: Utilizing a Multi-Stakeholder Framework to Create Extension–Tourism Partnerships. Sustainability. 12(1):80. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010080
- Included DMOs implication for the green brand image creation and added Figure 2 in Appendix E as example in relation to this topic.
With all your suggested improvements, we hope that our manuscript will be published in the prestigious journal Sustainability in the nearest future.
With the best regards,
Prof. Rebeca Antolin,
José Ramón Sarmiento Guede and
Arta Antonovica
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The reviewed manuscript addresses a highly-important issue of hospitality greening. It incorporates the both theoretical and empirical knowledge and presents really novel information from Spain. The study itself is perfect, and the paper is well-done. After careful reading, I do not find any serious problem. In my opinion, this contribution is suitable to 'Sustainability' after small improvements (see below).
- Please, avoid redundant phrasing in the beginning of Abstract and focus it on your findings.
- Methodology: I suggest to indicate the nationality of respondents. And add a simple map showing the places where you conducted the survey. For instance, I'm well aware of four, but I hear about Benidorm for the first time. The other readers may face similar problems.
- I think you need to consider a bigger number of limitations. For instance, this study deals with only Spain – the situation in the other countries may be different. Note also that people from different countries may have different attitudes toward hotel greening, so much depends on where your respondents are from.
- In References, I'd prefer seeing more articles published in top international journals after 2018.
- You have to polish the language slightly.
Reviewer 2 Report
At the least, the essence of scholarly research is to contribute unique dimensions, as the authors themselves noted in their conclusion, to discourse and practice on a subject matter. This paper makes no uniquely insightful contribution to the subject of research. I surmise that the point the authors made is simply that they surveyed a number of hotel patrons who stated that they are satisfied with the so-called ‘green’ hotels they patronized (ecological hotels in line 337). Therefore, the authors concluded, hotels should intensify “correct communication” (line 492). There is no clue of what correct communication means. Yet, if the statistical rates of the respondents' satisfaction were so high, what do the authors want the reader to make of lines 509-510? Also, the feeble conclusion about correct communication did not come from the survey respondents per se, same as the litany of wishes the authors called recommendations (lines 509-540). Since these wishes did not come from the survey respondents, they have no place in scholarly research. This shortcoming exemplifies many other lapses that demonstrate serious problems with the research design. For example, the keywords (lines 24-25) are naïve and trivial. The research question (line 61), which should have elicited ‘yes, no, not sure’ responses, misrepresented the authors’ intention in the paper, hence the question is not consistent with the findings of the research. The authors did not provide any attributes for the variables they posed to respondents as indicators of ‘greenness.’ There is no evidence that the respondents had a common understanding and interpretation of the variables. How, for example, do respondents interpret hotel policy, hotel budget (line 369, G12, 14 and 15), trust, etc., for them to provide responses amenable to statistical analysis? As a result, most of the statistical analysis in the paper say nothing substantive on the research question. For a self-reporting survey on a social issue, the authors exploited statistics and that did not add credibility and substance to the research. Subjective responses are, at best, represented by nominal and to some extent ordinal data. Thus, subjecting all the responses to statistical manipulation is scholarly untenable in the least.
In terms of ‘teachable lessons,’ if, for example, the authors had investigated specific initiatives that hotels take which affect the environment positively, and how the respondents rate their satisfaction, trust, loyalty and the other variables listed by the authors, on the initiatives, then hotels form other places could emulate or adapt some of the initiatives (e.g., waste water recycling, re-use of hotel towels and bed sheets, green purchasing for hotel restaurants, calibrated water pressure and temperature, etc.). Another flaw is that the authors seem to misapply the concept of ‘hypothesis,’ as they did not state the H1 and H2 (null and alternate), as is required in scholarly research. A study of this nature uses other social science concepts, such as postulations, conjectures, etc.
Besides the substantive flaws described above, there were other less tragic technical writing flaws which, regardless, diminished the scholarly stature of the paper. Annoying run-on, clumsy and redundant sentences littered the paper (lines 15-16, 37-40, 54-59, 357-360, 366-368, 496-501, etc.), as well as grammatical and syntax errors. These errors made it more difficult to capture or comprehend some of the authors’ submissions. Professional proof-readers would be of great help in the authors’ future work.
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Editor.
Thanks for giving the opportunity to review this paper. The manuscript: "The green image in the Spanish hotel sector. Analysis of its 2 consequences from a relational perspective" the main objective of this investigation is to ana-63 lyse whether the green strategies that are being implemented in the hotel sector have an 64 influence on consumer attitudes and behaviour.
Introduction.
I would suggest the authors to reduce the introduction and check the words separated by hyphens, this is unprofessional in English grammar (All paper).
From my point of view the paper looks like a dissertation. Research gap and value in the introduction section should also be discussed rather to theoretical relevance. I would suggest the authors to change the majority of keywords, these cannot be all "green"
Literature Review.
The must be updated, We are researchers I attached two images.
I would suggest the authors to be more specific about the topic and focus on the goals. I do not understand all hypothesis with the "green", for example Green satisfaction, satisfaction is not a color, this is a feeling.
I do not see the perception of customer variable in this study.
Are the brand image related and business philosophy with the green image. Authors do not speak about this relationship.
Methodology
I like the method of research in this paper, (survey) and collaboration with TripAdvisor, besides of 20 hotels. 732 questionnaires es a good sample.
The questionnaire and its corresponding authors is acceptable. And SPSS software is related with this topic and analysis.
Results of research
I would suggest the authors to reduce all tables, please.
Results are presented clearly and analysed appropriately, although I recommend to implement updated authors, we are in 2021.
I am surprised that all the hypotheses are accepted.
Conclusions
I would suggest the authors to focus on goals about their study. Furthermore, conclusions must be structured. The authors mix conclusions, implications, limitations and future researchers.Would be better conclusions 6. / Implications 6.1 / 6.2 limitations ... the conclusions have to be better defined. This does not show the reality of the research results.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
