Sustainable travel through experienced tourists’ desire for eudaemonia and immersion

ABSTRACT Consumption paradoxes create challenges for truly sustainable production and consumption practices across industries. This is also visible in tourism. Although today’s consumers have a greater consciousness of their own environmental footprints, demand for leisure travel appears insatiable as expressed in constantly growing international tourism until 2019. With the aim to achieve transformation towards more sustainability in future tourism, the lens has turned towards the consumer’s central role in the fulfilment of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This article puts experienced tourists into the spotlight and aims to explore whether and how the experienced tourist’s desire for eudaemonic and immersive experiences can contribute to more sustainable travel patterns. It adopts a supply-demand perspective through a mixed-methods research design implemented in Germany and New Zealand. Results demonstrate that tourists with higher self-assessed experience levels are more likely to travel for eudaemonic reasons and adopt sustainable travel patterns compared to less experienced tourists. This article argues that experienced tourists are central in the transformation towards more sustainable tourism futures and that a better understanding of them is needed. These novel insights advance theory and practice, contributing to closing existing knowledge gaps related to sustainable consumption in a tourism context.