Making and Breaking Sustainability Habits: Behavioural Insights for Sustainable Tourist Behaviour
This workshop will explore how habitual, often unconscious behaviours within hospitality and tourism contribute to the sector’s substantial environmental impact, and how habit theory can be leveraged to break unsustainable habits and foster pro-environmental ones without diminishing visitor experience.
Habit researchers, hospitality and tourism scholars and industry partners will come together for the workshop and develop new conceptual and empirical directions to apply habit-based solutions to sustainability challenges in tourism.
Most unsustainable tourist behaviour is not about choices — it’s a matter of habit.
Across tourism and hospitality, many of the behaviours that drive energy use, water consumption, food waste and emissions are not consciously chosen; they’re habits, done ‘on autopilot’. This workshop will focus on how habitual behaviours shape sustainability outcomes in tourism and hospitality — and how habit theory can be leveraged to break unsustainable habits and foster pro-environmental ones without diminishing visitor experience. Industry leaders from hotels, destinations and tourism organisations will come together with academic experts in habit psychology and tourism to redesign habitual behaviour and develop new conceptual and empirical directions to apply habit-based solutions to sustainability challenges in tourism.
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Dr Marion Karl, Surrey Hospitality and Tourism Management
