Shades of Green. Greenwashing in the Tourism Industry

Over the past decade few marketing topics have been more dynamic than that of environment or sustainability. Over a few years we have witnessed consumers shift from being highly skeptical about the performance of green products to the commoditization of green in many categories.
The recent explosion of green media, products, services, and marketing has brought with it a sea of confusion and a lack of trust, all of which risk undermining the entire green movement and returning us to an era of consumer apathy.
It is therefore of crucial importance to discover whether the climate-friendly revolution more and more advertised today is real. Many businesses around the world have recently recognised the value in being seen as climate-friendly, so almost every major global brand has embarked on a campaign designed to persuade the customer that it is cutting its carbon footprint. But is this eco-friendly revolution really underway? Are the world’s biggest and greenest-looking brands actually reducing the carbon footprint of their products or the proliferation of climate-friendly advertising is mostly greenwashing?
The aim of this work is to analyze and study this phenomenon comparing the climate-friendly campaigns and claims with what businesses are actually doing, to understand if companies are really becoming climate-friendly or mostly greenwashing.
In the first chapter I will analyse the concept of green economy and also the birth of a new marketing approach, the green marketing, that should support the idea of green economy. Here the role of eco labels will be highlight and some important marketing tools addressing the consumer to purchase goods more respectful of the environment will be focused on.
In the second chapter I will analyze the birth and the development of the greenwashing phenomenon, with some examples that represent the resounding situations of businesses trying to clean up their reputation through a false green product. This misleading practice unfortunately affects also the tourist sphere, the travel industry is not immune to the charm of greenwashing and to the possibility of easy profits that it offers. I will also consider the new custom of information and awareness campaigns realized by organizations that try to contain the greenwashing spread. Many of these awareness campaigns give an award for the greenwashing to businesses that every year advertise their product with a misleading communication.
The third chapter describes the travel industry eco-lies, analyzing all the misleading advertising campaigns that promises customers the illusion of a green vacation. Through the description of the green travelling sins as outlined by the environmental writer Jacqueline Kuehnel, I try also to explain how to recognize and avoid deceptive tourist products and services.
In the forth and fifth chapter I analyze the two big polluters of the tourist sector, the cruise industry and the airline industry. Today greenwashing practices in these sectors are more and more used to clean up their bad environmental reputation. For this reason in these two final chapters I compare some resounding greenwashing advertising with some real sustainability initiatives that can be a new beginning to achieve more ambitious goals avoiding the greenwashing practice.