Sustainable practices in the hotel industry

The environmental impacts generated by the tourism and hospitality sector have gained considerableattention from scholars in recent years. Green hotels and sustainable practices have been largely studiedas a way to respond to the growing consumers’ environmental awareness and to improve theenvironmental, social and economic impact of the sector. This growing body of literature uses differentpoints of view, methodologies and theories, also investigating different geographical areas. The aim ofthis review is to give a comprehensive overview of the academic studies on green hotels research, identify research gaps, and provide potential future research directions on the topic. The paperexplores the body of literature on sustainable practices in hotels, revisiting 600 articles, collectedthrough the Scopus databases, and evaluating it using specific structural dimensions to group theselected literature into analytical categories. Several studies reviewed green and sustainability researchin hospitality. With respect to past reviews produced by other scholars, this study contains variousnovelties that provide added value to better understand the topic under investigation. First, it exploresthe topic with a systematic approach, providing an exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of thephenomenon with rigorous and reproducible research criteria. Second, it includes a wide spectrum ofscholars’ publications (600 papers), in comparison with other reviews previously produced and itspecifically explores the research about sustainable practices in hotels. Additionally, the investigationson the topic have considerably increased during the last years, and this work provides an updatedoverview of this research field. Finally, the paper presents the main limitations of the study andidentifies opportunities for future research.