Impacts of green marketing strategies on benefits of hotels: the case from Serbia.

It is believed that tourism slowly and silently destroys environment, therefore implementing green technologies and responsible business behavior are among the most trending issues in contemporary tourism. Implementing Environmental Management System and quality standards ISO14000 and ISO14001 in hotels in Serbia are still at the early stage. The main goal of this study was to investigate the major obstacles for implementation of business based on ecological awareness and to assess to what extent the Green Marketing Strategies have influence on the image of the hotels, relations with the local community, competitiveness on the market, profitability and satisfaction of employees. The sample comprised 20% of the total number of hotels in Serbia which are known to use any form of ‘green’ marketing. The results confirm that the process of implementation of sustainable marketing strategies is at a very low scale (M=2.89). The regression analysis shows that the most beneficial are the satisfaction of employees and profitability. Furthermore, the results show that there are no differences in the implementation of such strategies regarding the hotels location, categorization and capacity, whereas certain benefits of green marketing vary in relation to location and the capacity of the hotel.