The Carbon Emission Efficiency And Influencing Factors Of China’s Hotel Industry Under The Homestay Growth

Hotels emit large amounts of CO₂ when providing services.Carbon neutrality objectives and the growth of homestays have forced hotel managers to pay more attention to carbon reduction,and realized the importance of saving energy and reducing emissions.There is obvious regional heterogeneity in carbon emission efficiency,and homestays provide different accommodation experiences for tourists.It is a key step to promote the green and sustainable development of China’s hotel industry to accurately identify the impact of homestay as a sub-branch of the sharing economy on the carbon emission efficiency of the hotel industry in different regions.From a green efficiency perspective,the article looks at the input and output data of the hotel industry,in 30 Chinese provinces in the period 2016–2018.Using the input-output method and the three-stage SBM-DEA model,the article constructs a model to evaluate the carbon emission efficiency of the hotel industry,considering homestays as an environmental factor in the 30 provinces during the study period.The study uses the Tobit regression model to make sub-regional regression of the number of homestays and the carbon emission efficiency of the hotel industry.It analyzes and interprets the impact of homestay on carbon emission efficiency of China’s regional hotel industry.First,this paper adopted the input–output method and strip the hotel energy input from the tourism industry to calculate hotel CO₂ emissions.It was found that the amount of CO₂emissions in the hotel industry decreased from the year of 2016 to 2018,and there are structural differences in the CO₂ emissions of the hotel industry in China.The CO₂ emission was the highest in the central region,followed by the western region and the lowest in the eastern region.The energy conservation and emission reduction work of the hotel industry in the future should focus on the central region.Furthermore,this paper adopted the three‐stage SBM‐DEA model to evaluate hotel carbon emission efficiency in 30 provinces in China.The results show that carbon emission efficiency increased significantly when environmental factors were eliminated.A close observation of different regions shows that the eastern region has a higher carbon emission efficiency than the western and middle regions,with the hotel industry increasing its carbon efficiency by about 20 percent on average.The emergence of homestays has led to increased input slacks in the labor and energy consumption of hotels,which has a negative effect on efficiency indirectly.The increase of industrial structure and urbanization ratio reduces the input of hotel labor and energy consumption,which has a positive effect on carbon emission efficiency.Furthermore,this article uses Tobit model to study the impact of the number of homestays in eastern,central and western regions on the carbon emission efficiency.The regression results showed that with the gradual increase of macro factor variables,the significant positive impact of the number of homestays on carbon emission efficiency in the central region remained stable,while the carbon emission efficiency in the eastern region was gradually unaffected by the number of homestays.There is a“U”shaped relationship between the carbon emission efficiency of hotel industry and the number of homestays in western region.This shows that the increase in the number of homestays drives the green development of the hotel industry in central and western regions,and has a direct positive impact on carbon efficiency.The way for the hotel industry to improve carbon emission efficiency is to improve the energy consumption structure in the eastern region,and to develop homestays to some extent in the central and western regions to promote the sustainable development of the accommodation industry.Finally,from the perspective of hotel industry development and government governance,the hotel industry should avoid evil competition with homestay,should optimize its own energy structure,and promote the green development of the hotel industry.