Pro-Environmental Behavior in Tourism

Environmental sustainability is a key challenge of humanity. Tourism is one of the activities contributing significantly to environmental damage. The United Nations Environment Program states that uncontrolled conventional tourism poses potential threats to many natural areas around the world. It is critical - both at the global and the local destination level - to find effective ways to reduce the environmental harm caused by tourism activities. The proposed research project achieves that by changing tourist behavior. With more than six billion tourists going on holiday every single year, even the smallest changes in tourist behavior could collectively achieve material change for the better. The starting point for this project are recent findings reported in Nature Climate Change about the effectiveness of pro-environmental appeals in making human behavior more environmentally friendly. These studies have been conducted in peoples everyday living contexts. But vacations are - by definition - the very opposite of peoples everyday context. The purpose of vacations is pleasure and enjoyment, not behaving responsibly for the benefit of humanity. It cannot, therefore, be assumed that these findings generalize to the vacation context. The proposed project aims at rigorously investigating this. Specifically, we ask two key questions: Can pro-environmental appeals induce pro- environmental behavior by tourists? If so, what are the key characteristics of the most successful appeals in this specific pleasure seeking context? The research questions will be answered by designing a series of pro-environmental appeals, informed directly by a range of theories of human behavior; some general in nature, others specifically developed to explain human pro-environmental behaviors. The effectiveness of the newly designed pro-environmental appeals will then be experimentally tested across a range of real tourism businesses using as dependent variables physical measures, such as actual electricity and water use, or observed actual behavior, such as towel reuse (as opposed to stated behavior or behavioral intentions which are prone to biases). Findings resulting from this project have major theoretical implications: they either confirm or challenge current theory. If pro-environmental appeals prove to be effective in tourism, pro- environmental measures are directly available for tourism industry to adopt. Adoption of these measures will immediately reduce the environmental harm caused by the tourism industry. If, however, pro-environmental appeals prove to be ineffective in the tourism context, new theories for this context need to be developed and empirically tested.

Tourism is an important industry worldwide contributing to economic wealth but also having serious environmental impacts. Understanding tourist behavior and identifying measures to entice them to behave in environmentally sustainable ways is important for tourism researchers, but also provides insights into human behavior change. In this international project tourism researchers as well as statisticians from Austria and Slovenia collaborated to jointly investigate possibilities to make tourism more environmentally sustainable. The tourism context is different from the home context because people traveling for leisure are driven by a hedonic motif and focus on enjoyment. In this project we investigated how the enjoyment focus of the context impacts on environmentally friendly behavior. Results indicate that no threshold exist for enjoyment where people would abandon their environmentally friendly if the context has an enjoyment focus above the threshold. Rather other factors such as habit influence tourist behavior. In this project we focused on investigating changing a specific behavior: leaving uneaten food behind on the plate which was taken from an all-you-can-eat buffet. In a pre-study we assessed how plate waste varied in dependence of the meal type, guest composition, dining room environment and hotel setting. We then implemented message-based behavior change interventions and objectively measured plate waste. To ease measurements, we developed an automatic sensor-based measurement system which transferred the data on an ongoing basis to a central database which could be queried and the data easily extracted for analysis. In particular, we tested two messages aimed at reducing buffet plate waste. One built on established theories of human behavior (theory of planned behavior, value-belief-norm theory); it assumes that changing beliefs by providing information triggers behavior change. The second message built on hedonic psychology; it attempts to change behavior through humor, presenting the pro-environmental behavior as enjoyable. In the survey experiment, the belief-based message significantly increased intentions to reduce plate waste; but both messages failed to change behavior in a measurable way in a real hotel in Slovenia. Results of this project provide insights on how to pursue investigations of behavior change in the tourism context, emphasizing the requirement to also measure the behavior in a field experiment and that relying on self-stated behavioral intentions is insufficient. Furthermore, new aspects and constructs were considered to develop behavioral change interventions in particular in the tourism context where in contrast to environmentally sustainable behavior at home no economic benefits are associated with the desired behavior.