Personal Interest (Ir )Responsible Tourists

Abstract

One of the key factors shaping the future of tourism is climate change (Becken & Hay, 2007; Dwyer et al., 2009; Nordin, 2005). Burns and Bibbings (2009) even predict “the end of tourism” should current consumption patterns prevail. There is an alternative to this future, but to develop “new imaginations for the sustainable development” of tourism we must understand the wicked problem of tourists’ environmental behavior. Tourists’ environmental behavior impacts on sustainable development to varying degrees (Becken et al, 2003; Metz et al., 2007) depending on whether they behave responsibly or irresponsibly. People consider holidays as a break from everyday life (Becken, 2004; Dolnicar & Grün, 2009) which suggests that people may behave differently when they are tour- ists. For this reason, this chapter explores tourists’ uptake of environmental behaviors by examining their propensity to responsible environmental behavior while travelling. A better understanding of tourists’ environmental behavior can lead to strategies that support collaborative actions “towards facilitating tourism development that is inherently sustainable” (Jennings, 2018). Environmental behavior is a very complex field of research (Hergesell, 2017). Such behavior is determined by a range of internal and external factors with the significance of these factors differing dependent on the person, the context and the type of behavior under study. The question is hence how to reduce ‘irresponsible’ behavior.