Wulan Riyanti is a PhD student at Coventry University, supervised by Professor Benny Tjahjono. Her research focuses on sustainability in the hospitality industry, with a particular emphasis on sustainable practices in hotels. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Meeting, Incentive, Convention, and Exhibition (MICE) from Jakarta State Polytechnic, which provided her with both theoretical grounding and practical experience in the field.

Throughout her academic and professional journey, she has been actively involved in organising a range of events, from conferences and exhibitions to leisure programmes, overseeing the full cycle from preparation to execution. Wulan was also awarded the Indonesian International Student Mobility Awards (IISMA), allowing her to study at Coventry University as part of an exchange programme.

After completing her Master’s degree, Wulan was directly admitted to the second year of the PhD programme. Her current research focuses on sustainable practices in the hotel industry, with particular emphasis on the phenomenon of greenwashing. She seeks to understand how hotels establish and implement authentic environmental practices and how these are reflected in their decision-making processes.

Institutional Pressures and Authentic Environmental Practices in the Hotel Industry

The growing demand for sustainable hotel practices has led to an increase in green practice implementation, such as energy efficiency, waste reduction, water conservation, and community participation. While some hotels genuinely practise green, others may benefit from deceptive green marketing, referred to as greenwashing. With greater awareness of the greenwashing phenomenon in the hotel industry, authenticity emerges as an important component of guests' trust and credibility. Numerous studies have identified several pressures that encourage green practices in the hotel industry. The pressures must then be navigated in line with the challenges, resulting in an advance driver for hotels to achieve genuine environmental management practices. This research examines the impact of institutional pressures on the adoption of authentic environmental management practices in the hotel industry. By integrating institutional theory and impression management theory, the research investigates how normative, coercive, and mimetic pressures impact on green practices. Furthermore, top management commitment and perceived advantages reinforce the relationship between institutional pressures and green practices. This research further adds to the literature by developing a comprehensive framework for analysing the dynamics of genuine green practices in hotels.