Greenwashing Attitudes and Ethical Aspects in Bulgarian Tourism Business

In the ever-expanding environment of the regulatory frameworks and rules of the European Union, greenwashing is becoming a highly subtle and widespread marketing practice in different areas of industries, including tourism. For that reason, the general purpose of this article is to explore the managerial attitudes towards potential greenwashing pitfalls amongst tourism companies in Bulgaria by taking into consideration the ethical aspects and specific corporate communication. The current research study is based on the of use of an embedded single-case design involving the expert views from eight tourism companies in the role of representative business units from different tourism sectors (a seaside resort and hotels, a city hotel, a tour operator and a travel agency, a regional museum and an airport managing company). For the empirical part of the study, data were collected during the period October-December 2025 in alignment with a hybrid survey tool combining the characteristics of structured Likert-scale multiple-choice questions and additional open-ended questions in the form of unstructured interviews. The results from the empirical research indicate the presence of certain sectoral differences across the surveyed business units: companies with intensive use of infrastructural elements (the hotels and the tour operator) report for their higher engagement in particular green practices like waste, energy, water management and plastics reduction, whereas the travel intermediaries and the cultural institution primarily express their preferences in the field of green initiatives in customer relations. For most of the interviewed experts the explicit levels of high implementation costs, administrative burden and limited public incentives are perceived as major barriers for transition of their companies towards a holistic green orientation. On the other hand, respondents generally support stricter EU rules against misleading corporate green assertions by taking into account the existent skepticism among tourists towards green marketing communication. Despite the revealed evidences of limited companies’ endorsements of misleading green assertions, it could be suggested from the obtained results an existing evidence of a contextually determined tendency for the implementation of low-budget green marketing tactics among certain market participants, as well as an emerging trend towards cautious disclosure of sustainability-related actions (green hushing) in the face of anticipated new regulatory scrutiny. Overall in this study are outlined the ethical boundaries of companies’ green assertions in Bulgarian tourism industry shaped under the joint influence of regulatory pressures, market dynamics and communication risks.