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 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 research questions will be answered by designing a series of pro-environmental appeals. Their effectiveness 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.