Promoting ethical actions against unethical hotels

Abstract

This paper presents the investigation of consumers' intentions to adopt negative and discursive ethical actions with regard to a hotels' choice. Within the ethical tourism research area, the usual approach has been to examine consumers' preferences towards green and/or ethical hotels. This approach, although very useful in consumer research, study, an opposite approach has been put under examination: it was hypothesized that a consumers' association needs intentions to reject (boycott) or sign a petition against an unethical hotel chain in conjoint with the most suitable for these actions promotion media. On the basis of this research information, the consumers' association shall build an optimum strategy for its members and for the general public to adopt it. The Conjoint Analysis has been utilized to formulate distinct types of the consumers' association strategy based on 2 chosen attributes, namely: action (boycotting, petition signs) and media (flyers, e-mail/sms, social media post). The orthogonal design provided 6 combinations of the associations' potential strategies and the respondents were asked to both rate and rank the relevant cards. A structured questionnaire was administered to 450 households in the Thessaloniki urban area provided 420 usable questionnaires. Besides the cards of the combinations, the questionnaire included selected demographics (age, education, gender, income and occupation). The respondents were approached through personal interviews taken by trained marketing senior students. The sampling method was a combination of the two-stage area sampling and the systematic sampling. action (76.515% and 23.485% of the overall performance determined respectively). Both ranking and rating results indicated that boycotting through social media is the most preferable combination. Analysis of Variance revealed that young (25-34 years of age) and University graduates are those to participate in boycotting promoted by social media more willingly than their counterparts are. This study is financed by the Research Committee of A.T.E.I. of Thessaloniki, Research Support Programme 2010. Project number 80099 entitled: Investigating aspects of the negative ethical consumerism: Emphasis on the determination of factors