Sustainable Tourism: Can Behavioural Science Help Overcome the Paradox?

Welcome back! As summer draws to a close and those sunny holidays feel slightly more distant, we’ve been reflecting on the impact of tourism on the environment. With that in mind, this newsletter advocates for using behavioural science to encourage tourists’ to behave more sustainably. We consider how people behave differently on holiday, why this supports a behavioural approach, and the importance of evaluating potential interventions. 

N.B. The second webinar of our Behavioural Insights in Practice series takes place tomorrow (Thursday 3rd October) - sign up to hear the lessons we’ve learnt from running over 50 behavioural experiments in the energy and water sectors!  

The impact of tourism

Tourism has a vital economic impact; for many places, income from tourism is crucial, and makes up a significant portion of their economy. Furthermore, there are numerous mental and physical health benefits for tourists themselves. However, tourism currently has a severe impact on the environment, contributing approximately 8% of total global emissions. Although achieving net zero in the tourism industry may be particularly challenging, there is certainly scope to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint. This newsletter considers how our behaviour changes when we become ‘tourists’, and outlines the opportunities for applying behavioural insights to encourage tourists to be more sustainable. 

Tourists are a unique example of human behaviour

As tourists, we behave differently than when we are at home. Being in a novel physical environment can inhibit our (perceived) capability to perform pro-environmental behaviours. For example, if we are in a new city we may lack confidence to use their public transport system and thus take more taxis than usual. Similarly, we may not feel capable of recycling accurately, or carry a reusable water bottle with us - causing us to consume more single-use plastic. Being on holiday can affect our mindset as we become more hedonic - seeking pleasure and avoiding ‘pain’. Our desire to maximise our enjoyment can lead us to neglect pro-environmental actions, even when we normally carry them out. In fact, the average persons’ carbon footprint doubles on holiday, and even committed environmentalists see a fall-off in their responsible behaviours (de Bruijn et al., 2013).

The emissions produced by tourists can be loosely categorised as resulting from either pre-trip decisions such as where to go and how to get there (as well as how many trips to take), or behaviours whilst away. Transport - in particular, flying - makes up about half of tourism’s emissions. Behaviours that typically change whilst we are away include how much energy, water, and plastic we consume, how much food waste we produce, and what transport modes we use to move around within our destination. 

The case for behavioural interventions

The physical and psychological changes that tourists experience are ripe for behavioural interventions, especially as typical policy tools such as education, regulation, and financial measures may become less effective in this context. If tourists don’t speak the local language (or English), communicating information and making tourists aware of local laws can be a challenge. Taxes and subsidies have less effect than usual as our perception of money changes whilst we are travelling; this is partly because we don’t intuitively calculate exchange rates, but mostly because we have (physically or mentally) earmarked an amount that we are happy to spend and we are more relaxed in general. 

For these reasons, type 1 nudges that target our automatic behaviour can be especially effective in the holiday context. A classic example is the use of social norms messaging to increase hotel towel-reuse; Goldstein and Goldstein (2008) compared a typical message - “Please re-use the towels. Help save the environment…” with different social norms messages stating “75% of guests use their towel more than once…” and discovered the latter to increase reuse rates by approximately 20 percent. Kallbekken & Sælen (2013) found a similar effect for reducing food waste at a hotel buffet by providing smaller plates. 

It is common for tourists to have an intention-action gap, and for this to cause cognitive dissonance - a state of psychological discomfort due to the difference between our attitudes and our behaviours. Because tourists typically reduce their cognitive dissonance by adjusting their attitudes - such as adopting beliefs that excuse their behaviour - type 2 nudges that prompt them to reflect can also be effective, particularly at times when they are making impactful decisions, such as booking flights or hotels. 

Solutions should be designed based on an understanding of what’s driving the current behaviour, which can be discovered through a behavioural diagnostic. For instance, certain common behaviours of hotel guests, such as asking for clean towels each day, showering longer, or setting a lower AC temperature, may be motivated by a desire to recoup value from their expensive room, or because they perceive these actions as ‘free’. Reminding them of the environmental and social costs of these actions may help, but a change to the price architecture - so that such features are no longer included in the price of their room - would potentially be most effective given their current motivations. Despite this having a negligible impact on the total price of their stay, the resulting mindset shift may have an outsized effect on their behaviour - just like the 5p plastic bag charge in the UK.  

Because tourists behave differently than non-tourists, it is essential to test that interventions work in their unique context. Indeed, tourists and tourist destinations themselves are extremely heterogeneous; what works on a campsite in Wales may not work in a hotel in Hong Kong! Therefore, evaluation is vital to be confident of an interventions’ effectiveness. 

Combining behavioural insights with other methods

This newsletter has largely focused on reducing demand-side emissions (i.e. those produced by tourists themselves), but behavioural science can also be applied to the supply-side of tourism to nudge producers and service providers. For example, we worked with Virgin Atlantic to run the first ever randomised controlled trial (RCT) in aviation, testing the impact of different nudges on pilot’s fuel-saving behaviour. Our 8-month trial saved a total of 21,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions (valued at $5.5 million) whilst increasing pilots’ job satisfaction. 

In practice, behavioural science should be used as part of a multi-faceted approach to reduce emissions from tourism. Sometimes this means implementing stand-alone behavioural interventions, but often this means integrating behavioural insights into the design of other policies. Understanding the unique psychological context that tourists operate in and its effects on their behaviour is an important first-step to address the unsustainability of tourism. 

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Read our latest blog on urban mobility

Behaviour change is essential to embrace sustainable transport modes in cities. Our latest blog explores the behavioural challenges and opportunities of some of the EU’s main policy priorities, including modal shift, shared mobility, Mobility-as-a-Service and EV adoption. It considers how to disrupt transport habits, publicise social norms, and use behavioural segmentation to create targeted incentives. Read the full blog post via the link below.

Thank you for reading this month’s newsletter on sustainable tourism! As always, if you have any thoughts on the opportunities for behavioural science in this area, please share them in the comments or get in touch with us! We’d love to hear from you!