The importance of ESG management is being emphasized worldwide. ESG, which were born as a measure of a company's non-financial performance, are no longer just a demand for the capital market. The public's demand for ESG management is expanding more an...
The importance of ESG management is being emphasized worldwide. ESG, which were born as a measure of a company's non-financial performance, are no longer just a demand for the capital market. The public's demand for ESG management is expanding more and more, and furthermore ESG is affecting actual consumption behavior. This huge trend suggests that ESG will become an indispensable element in the hotel industry. ESG is emerging as a direction for hotel companies to move forward. Despite the expansion of social demands for ESG, discussions are being held mainly by luxury hotels which wer affiliates of conglomerates due to the tendency to recognize ESG as an expense or as a responsibility only for conglomerates (Seo Jung-tae et al. 4, 2022). Therefore, this study was conducted to suggest the direction of ESG management and strategic ESG management of small and medium-sized hotel companies. The main focus of this study was to verify the hypothesis that the importance of ESG management perceived by customers using budget hotels in Jeju will have a significant positive (+) effect on the revisit intention. In order to achieve this, previous studies through literature research were reviewed, research models and hypotheses were established based on previous studies, and empirical analysis was conducted for customers using budget hotels in Jeju. For empirical analysis, mobile and on-site surveys were conducted for customers using budget hotels in Jeju for a total of 40 days from February 14, 2022 to March 25, 2022. The survey was conducted based on a total of 315 valid samples. Based on survay result, the hypothesis of this study was verified using the SPSS 25.0 program to analyze the reliability of each variable, analyze the descriptive statistics of major variables, analyze the factor, and check the moderating effect of the morderating variable. The results of the empirical analysis on the research hypothesis are summarized as follows.
First, it was confirmed that the importance of ESG management perceived by customers using budget hotels in Jeju partially affects the intention to revisit. Specifically, it was confirmed that among the sub-factors of ESG management, social responsibility management and governance structure had a significant positive (+) effect on revisit intention, but environmental management did not have a significant effect. Second, it was confirmed that the level of ESG perception of customers in Jeju had a partially moderating effect on the influence of the importance of ESG management perceived by customers visiting mid- to low-priced hotels on the intention to revisit. Specifically, among the sub-factors of ESG management, ESG recognitionness level did not have a significant moderating effect in the relationship between governance structure, environmental management, and revisit intention, but ESG recognition level had a significant moderating effect in the relationship between social responsibility management and revisit intention.
Based on the results of this study, the following implications were derived. First, since the majority of ESG research is composed of studies examining financial performance from an investment perspective, it is academic significance that ESG research was conducted in connection with the revisit intention from a customer's perspective. Second, it is meaningful that ESG research, which is mainly focused on conglomerates, has been expanded to the area of SMEs. Third, many hotel companies treat environmental management as the most important marketing element among the sub-factors of ESG management. However, the research results confirmed that the perception of a company that fulfills its social responsibilities and has established a transparent governance structure significantly affects customers' intention to revisit budget hotels. Based on this, a more strategic marketing direction was suggested when carrying out ESG management of budget hotel companies. Lastly, it was confirmed that the ESG recognition level of customers partially had a positive (+) moderating effect in the process of ESG management of budget hotels. This means that when budget hotel conducting ESG management, it would be effective that providing customers that it is an ESG management company via marketing progress and, at the same time, providing Programs to Raise customers' ESG recognition level.