Consumer priorities: what would people sacrifice in order to fly on holidays?

Despite increasing attention on air travel's significant and disproportionate contribution to climate change, meaningful reduction in consumer demand is nowhere in sight. Taking a consumer behaviour approach, this study adopts Katz's attitude functions theory as a framework to better understand factors that shape attitudes towards discretionary air travel amidst growing climate concern. Interviews with Australian travellers indicate that the functions of air travel attitudes are utilitarian, value-expressive, and social-adjustive. These functions serve independent yet interrelated purposes. The ego-defense function was generally dormant until triggered when climate change was discussed directly, but then served as a mechanism for protecting the value-expressive and social adjustive functions. The timeliness and importance of the paper's insights have been amplified by the need to rebuild post-COVID aviation for a climate safe future.

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 95%

Section: Resultscontrasting

confidence: 95%

Consumer attitudes towards flying amidst growing climate concern

Cocolas

Walters

Ruhanen

et al. 2020

“…Social media play an important role in the wider dissemination of climate change facts and interpretations, both from centralised media accounts and through decentralised peer-to-peer networks (Bastos et al, 2018). Air travel has received considerable attention in both mainstream and social media, possibly because it is a desirable activity that many people in the Western world can relate to (Kantenbacher et al, 2019). Yet, aviation is one of the fastest-growing sources of GHG emissions (Becken & Pant, 2019), making it, quite simply, a highly contentious societal issue.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate crisis and flying: social media analysis traces the rise of “flightshame”

Becken

Friedl

Stantić

et al. 2020

Even before the global halt to extensive mobility due to the coronavirus crisis, there has been growing resistance amongst some groups to flying. Reflecting increasing concern about the imminent climate emergency, the phenomenon of feeling ashamed of flying and expressing related emotions through communication has resulted in the neologism "flygskam". Drawing on 14,212 Twitter posts that contained "flygskam" and a further 1037 using the English "flightshame", this research examined the spatial-temporal spread of these words from Sweden starting in 2016 to the rest of the world indicating a global phenomenon. The findings indicate that national context continues to be important in understanding the nexus of individual and social sensemaking and processing of new information. They also demonstrate, however, that global networks (facilitated through social media) might challenge the needs of physical mobility as requirements to connect, exchange views, and create identity through peer group membership. Further analysis of the content revealed key perspectives and topics, providing insight into the relatively homogeneous discussions amongst a network community. Only 6% of posts rejected the notion, whilst the majority indicated support and advanced suggestions for more sustainable alternatives. It might be too early to say whether language behaviour expressed in online communication translates into real behaviour, but the current pandemic may well provide further impetus to no-fly movements by way of a strategic alliance between different peer groups.

“…The challenge of mitigating climate change explicitly motivated two of the papers in this special issue (Hanna & Adams, 2017;Kantenbacher, Hanna, Miller, Scarles, & Yang, 2017). The other three find implicit motivation in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing environmental impacts (Hall & Ram, 2017;Scuttari, Orsi, & Bassani, 2018;Smith, Robbins, & Dickinson, 2017).…”

Section: The Papers In This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Desirable tourism transport futures

Peeters

Higham

Cohen

et al. 2018

This editorial for the special issue on 'Desirable Tourism Transport Futures' explores approaches to transitioning the tourism sector to a sustainable emissions path. It starts by describing an undesirable tourism transport future associated with a business-as-usual scenario, which will inevitably cause the climate mitigation goals outlined in the Paris Climate Accord (2015) to soon become unattainable. We then outline a scenario for a climatically desirable future, the social and economic implications of which are explored. The challenge of mitigating climate change is critical to desirable tourism transportation futures, although to date relatively little attention has been paid to this aspect of sustainable tourism. This is an omission that must be urgently addressed. This special issue addresses desirable tourist transportation futures in relation to deep cut emissions reductions and, therefore, mitigation of climate change-induced environmental impacts. It is important that desirable tourism transport futures are critically considered in terms of both spatial and temporal scale. The scenarios that inform this introductory article provide some insights at the long-term macro-scale. These scenarios are associated with desirable and undesirable elements that will no doubt continue to be the subject of much debate and contestation. While these scenarios will represent both opportunities and threats to the full spectrum of tourism industry stakeholders, they should also inform manifold avenues of future research at a critical moment in the evolution of tourism transportation and the pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030).