The Development of a Green Practice Index for the Malaysian Hotel Industry

Abstract

In recent years, the hotel industry has recognized the need to have more environmentally 
friendly operations. The main focus, however, has been on improving environmental manage
ment practices in developed countries. Furthermore, most attempts to develop assessment tools 
for green practices have come from such countries as well, which have a different socio
economic situation from developing countries. Therefore, to capture a more accurate picture of 
environmental management practices from the developing country context, specifically a Ma
laysian context, the authors in this paper created an index to measure the level of green prac
tices among Malaysian hotels. Doing so, however, resulted in a search for green index develop
ment methods. This lead to the discovery that existing tools such as the Delphi method were 
not appropriate tools that could be used to develop a Malaysian green index. To address the 
above, the authors propose a green index development method that can be used for a Malaysian 
and developing country context. Hence, in this paper, the method of developing a green prac
tice index for the Malaysian hospitality industry, the differences and advantages of this method 
compared to the commonly used Delphi method and finally the Malaysian Green Practice In
dex for the hotel industry are presented.