Third Campus Fryslân PhD researcher on sustainability!

As of 15 November, Femke Vrenegoor started her PhD research on 'Closing the buy-in gap to salient ecolabel application for SME hotel entrepreneurs in the Netherlands'.

Femke Vrenegoor

Since sustainability has been a trend for many years now, we can see that in the hospitality industry it has also taken an important place in the daily operations of hotels. Hotel entrepreneurs choose to engage in CSR for many different reasons, and some of these entrepreneurs make the choice to get their sustainability efforts certified with for example a Green Key certificate. However, not all entrepreneurs will try to reach the highest level possible within the certificate, or push to reach more than the minimum number of required criteria within their level.

My research will try to understand the reasons for this behaviour, and evaluate whether these reasons can be connected to their motivation to engage CSR in the first place. Once the motivations of the hotel entrepreneur and their behaviour are understood, I wish to try to nudge them to more sustainable ecolabel application.

In my research I have chosen to focus on SME hotels as they comprise a large portion of the total amount of hotels in the Netherlands.