Antecedents of green purchase behaviour: an examination of altruism and environmental knowledge

Purpose Prior studies mostly investigated the relationship between the cognitive characteristics of individuals and their pro-environmentalism, addressing the need for green hotel operators to understand the different green purchase patterns of consumers. The problem is that, although consumers claim they are concerned about environmental issues, their purchasing behaviour does not translate, in practical terms, into actually booking green hotels. In other words, the connection between altruism, environmental knowledge and consumer visiting green hotel is fairly unexplored in the literature. This study aims to analyze the relationships of three types of altruism and two types of environmental knowledge with attitude and intention. Design/methodology/approach An integrated theoretical research model was used, based on the value–belief–norm theory of environmentalism. The collection of 248 questionnaires was followed by subsequent empirical testing of the proposed hypotheses, which was performed using SPSS and AMOS. Findings The resulting outcomes show a significant positive relationship between green purchase attitude and intention. Further, the biospheric, altruistic and collectivistic values, as well as subjective and objective knowledge were shown to positively influence attitude and intention towards green hotel selection, respectively. Research limitations/implications Because of the chosen online sampling method, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified need to study how visiting green hotel can be influenced by different types of altruism and environmental knowledge.