Abstract
This study examines whether consumer ratings of hotel eco-friendliness reflect sustainability performance in platform-mediated review environments. Using data from 6304 hotels across 100 cities, we compare Expedia's eco-friendliness ratings with sustainability information on Booking.com. Support Vector Machine and lineal regression analysis show that eco-friendliness ratings are explained almost entirely by overall guest satisfaction, while sustainability indicators (along with hotel category, chain affiliation, price, and number of reviews) contribute negligible explanatory power. These findings indicate that eco-friendliness ratings are largely reconstructed from general service impressions rather than informed assessments of environmental performance. The results constitute a boundary test of signalling theory in digital, low-involvement, multi-attribute review contexts, showing that credible sustainability signals may be overridden by heuristic judgment.