Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine guests’ experiences at green hotels and the impact of green experience on customer satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 727 green reviews (reviews on green experiences) of the top ten green hotels in the USA were downloaded from TripAdvisor for content analysis. Descriptive statistics and ordinal logistic regressions were then used. Findings: Guests have both positive and negative experiences at green hotels. “Energy”, “purchasing” and “education and innovation” are the most frequently discussed green practices. Some guests’ green experiences, such as “guest training”, “energy”, “water”, “purchasing” and “education and innovation”, significantly influence their overall satisfaction with hotels. Compared with basic green practices, advanced green practices tend to have greater impacts on customer satisfaction. Research limitations/implications: This study provides insight into guests’ green experiences at hotels and their impact on customer satisfaction. More importantly, this study examines the contribution of different types of green practices to customer satisfaction. As the green hotels examined in this study were not randomly selected, the results should be interpreted with caution. Practical implications: Different practices impact customer satisfaction in different ways, so hoteliers should refine their green strategies when they implement these green practices. Originality/value: Very few studies have examined the relationship between green practices and customer satisfaction. A gap still exists in specifically what types of green practices affect customer satisfaction and whether different levels of green practices have different impacts on customer satisfaction. This study investigates guests’ actual experiences and fills the above research gap.

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate guests’ perception of green hotels through a content analysis of online hotel reviews. A total of 7370 comments were collected, and 737 green comments were analyzed based on TripAdvisor’s top 10 green hotels. Our results indicate that the majority of hotel green practices are perceived as positive. Hotel guests consider some green practices, such as a reflective roofing system, a storm water management system, and guest training, as sincere efforts by hotels to be green and they complement them. However, some hotel guests assert that hotels may just be using green practices as a marketing tool or to gain financial benefits. Some green practices, such as temperature control, low water pressure, and degradable utensils, are actually not positively perceived. Therefore, our results suggest to hotel operators how they should implement being a sincere green hotel and how green practices should be approached to build environmental friendly branding strategies.

Marketers use celebrity endorsements to make advertisements believable and to enhance consumer recognition of the brand name. However, once a direct link has been formed from a celebrity to a brand, the negative information about the celebrity may reflect on to the endorsed brand. Applying the S-O-R model and the balance theory, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of celebrity-brand congruence and publicity on consumers’ attitudes toward the celebrity and brand as well as their buying intention. A survey of a 2 (congruence vs. incongruence) × 2 (positive vs. negative publicity) experimental design was conducted for this study. A total of 120 female Millennial consumers answered the survey and 105 surveys with usable data were collected. The mean age of the participants was 24 years old (SD = 3.28). Results found that the celebrity-brand congruence and publicity play a significant role in consumer behavior related to attitudes toward the celebrity and brand/product, as well as buying intention. Thus, retail marketers need to allocate more investigation into celebrity endorsements that match with brand image that can lead to long-term, positive partnerships.

This study investigates consumers’ perceptions (site trust and normative evaluation) and consumers’ desires (hedonic and utilitarian desires) in their impulse buying behaviors in relation to restaurant daily deals. A conceptual model was created based on the Belief-Desire of Emotion model. Five hundred usable survey responses were collected from those who had used restaurant daily deals. Data analysis was conducted using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. This study finds that hedonic and utilitarian desires have significant effects on consumers’ positive emotion, which in turn, influences consumers’ impulse buying behavior. Both urge-to-buy and browsing behavior were strongly affected by positive emotion. Furthermore, the results show that the urge-to-buy had a significant and strong influence on impulse buying. These findings provide a practical understanding of the wide range of non-cognitive emotional processes of consumers in their impulse buying behavior by assessing the influence of each factor in restaurant daily deals.

With increased concern for environmental and social issues, consumers and the apparel industry have become more interested in the topic of sustainability. Numerous brands strive to reposition in sustainability by employing credible sources and maintaining information transparency to get consumers’ recognition. By employing the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, this study experimented with how sustainability positioning with credible sources (EPA vs. Celebrity vs. Social Media Influencer) and high (vs. low) transparency influence brand attachment, trust, and identification, leading to eWOM and brand loyalty. The findings indicate that sustainable positioning with credible sources (i.e., EPA and Social Media influencers) could achieve consumers’ positive brand attachment, trust, and identification in social media marketing. However, we did not find evidence of the impact of high (vs. low) transparency on these dependable variables. Furthermore, brand loyalty and eWOM are significantly influenced by consumers’ brand attachment and trust, whereas brand identification positively affects brand loyalty only, not eWOM. Additionally, this study found that women and higher-income groups had a high preference for sustainable brands.