Employees' Attitudes Toward the Environment in a Tourism Destination : a Symbolic Data Analysis

Green hotels, the world's second-largest hospitality industry, are growing more popular among travellers. As a result, hotel employees face climate change, global warming, air pollution, and resource shortages and are increasingly pushed to behave in an environment-friendly manner. This study aims to contribute to the growing body of knowledge on environmental sustainability in the tourism and hotel industry, looking at individual-level drivers of green behaviors, i.e., environmental knowledge, awareness, and concern. This work's innovative aspect considers a higher class of observation, the aggregate unit at the local level (i.e., destination) representing and measuring the relevant environment-related variables. Thus, employees’ environmental knowledge, awareness, and concern can be measured as symbolic data and precisely as interval data representing the variability of these variables spatially. In this respect, using symbolic clustering, we can understand the spatial distribution of pro-environmental attitudes in several relatively closed tourism destinations in the Campania Region (Italy)