The Level of Environmental Commitment in Tehran Hotels

Nowadays sustainable tourism development is no more considered as a choice but a necessity. In order to achieve sustainable tourism development, all actors in tourism system should undertake the sustainability commitments such as environmental commitment. The purpose of this paper is determining the level of environmental commitment in Tehran accommodation facilities, and identifying the factors that affect the propensity of managers of these units to adopt environmental considerations in this sector of tourism industry. Therefore the exploratory- descriptive research method is employed. Senior managers of 1-5 star hotels comprise the statistical population of this study. In addition to the descriptive statistics methods, various nonparametric inferential statistics tests are applied in analyzing the collected data.Findings of the study manifest that environmental management in the studied hotels can be classified into four levels of environmental commitment with most hotels situating at the basic level of environmental commitment (level 1). Also, according to the research findings “cost saving” is the most important motivation and “heavy cost of establishing and implementing environmental management practices” is the main obstacle to the implementation of environmental practices. An important finding of this study is that public ownership, size of hotels and the type of their clientele affect achieving more advanced levels of environmental commitment.