An investigation of the role of religiosity and religious values on hotel guests’ pro-environmental behaviour

Consumers are now expecting the hotels to be green due to the environmental reparation such as carbon emission, excessive consumption of water and energy associated with hotels (Verma, Chandra and Kumar, 2019). Moreover, promoting sustainable pro- environmental behaviour has become a priority for hoteliers due to the rise in the amount of wastage that hotels generate per guest per night (Styles et al., 2013). Thus, for hoteliers, it has become extremely important to determine the ways through which they can engage tourists to become active players in adapting sustainable behaviours such as recycling (Warren et al., 2016). One key way to influence consumers to engage in such pro-environmental behaviour is activating consumer values, it has been found that personal values has the ability to regulate consumer ecological responsible behaviours and can promote consumer engagement in pro-environmental behaviour (Diez & Ster, 1995; Pinto et al., 2011). However, these studies have largely focused on the effect of values such as egoistic, Biosphere and altruistic values and have ignored the effect of religious values in influencing pro-environmental behaviour among hotel guests. However, it has been found that religiosity is a significant predictor of consumer engagement in pro-environmental behaviour. For example, Felix and Braunsberger (2016) found that religiosity influence the proenvironmental behaviour among Mexican Catholic consumers. Rice (2006) on the other hand found that religiosity has a significant influence on Muslim consumers’ engagement in proenvironmental behaviour. From a methodological perspective, research that investigate key drivers behind tourists’ proenvironmental behaviour has mostly used self-reported past behaviour or used purchase intention as the key outcome variable of interest (Cvelbar et al., 2017). However, the key limitation associated with these research is that, despite of the positive attitude towards sustainable/proenvironmental consumption practices, very few consumers actually act accordingly (Juvan & Dolnicar ,2014). Hence, studies that have focused on actual behaviour tend to be limited (Dolnicar et al., 2017; Cvelbar et al., 2017). Therefore, there is a need for studies that measure actual proenvironmental behaviour such as recycling, picking up litter or re-using towels or similar (Juvan & Dolnicar, 2016). To fill these voids, building on the concept of religious priming (Ritter & Preston, 2013); which suggests that religiosity activated through different religious priming (e.g. agent, spiritual and institutional level) has the ability to influence pro-social behaviour, this study seeks to investigate the effect of religiosity and religious values on hotel guests’ participation in recycling behaviour focusing on Muslim consumers. The data for the study will be gathered via two experimental studies. Study 1 will involve a field study that measures the actual recycling behaviour of hotel guests in a real setting than measuring stated intentions that may suffer from self-response biases (Dolnicar et al., 2017). Study 2 will involve a laboratory study that investigates the effect of religiosity and religious values (through religious priming) influence recycling intentions. It is expected that the findings of this study will significantly contribute to the body of knowledge of literature on sustainable tourism, pro-environmental behaviour and religious tourism.