The Greening of Urban Hotels in South Africa: Evidence from Gauteng

Responsible tourism and climate change mitigation are issues on the South African policy agenda. This paper offers a contribution to the limited existing scholarship dealing with greening of hotels in the developing world. Against a backcloth of international debates on green hotels, the findings are presented from interviews conducted with urban hotels in Gauteng, South Africa. The key argument is that in the absence of any government regulatory measures progress of hotel greening initiatives is limited in scope, mainly driven by a mix of enterprise profit and corporate social responsibility considerations which are undertaken amidst low local consumer interest in green hotels as tourism products.