University-affiliated sustainability badges: Shared identity, tourist perceptions, and hotel manager receptivity

Hotel sustainability research shows that pro-environmental behaviour‑change interventions are often effective in field experiments, but widespread adoption by hotels remains limited. One possible explanation is that hotels lack external recognition that would make adopting these measures visible to guests and rewarding to managers. This study investigates whether university-affiliated sustainability badges could serve as a recognition mechanism, testing their effectiveness across two studies drawing on Signalling Theory and Social Identity Theory. In an online experiment (N=975), prospective hotel guests viewed simulated hotel booking pages featuring one of the four badge options, or no badge, across budget, mid-range, and luxury hotel pricing segments. All badge variations increased perceived hotel sustainability and guests’ sense of belonging to a community of environmentally conscious travellers (group identification). Badges did not trigger negative emotions, but the university affiliated logo did not perform better than a generic environmental logo on almost all measures, suggesting these effects are based on the presence of any badge, rather than the university partnership specifically. Semi-structured interviews with ten hotel managers found conditional receptivity to university-affiliated badges, primarily through a sense of shared values and community orientation with the partnering institution (collective values) rather than the badge’s function as a credibility signal. These findings suggest that collective values and shared identities, rather than signalling, may be the more promising mechanism for engaging hotels and guests around sustainability initiatives, and offer an encouraging direction for potential university-hotel partnerships that may translate into the future implementation of pro-environmental behaviour change interventions.