Ljubica Knezevic Cvelbar

Do Pro-environmental Appeals Trigger Pro-environmental Behavior in Hotel Guests?:

Appeals to people’s pro-environmental values have been shown to trigger pro-environmental behavior across a range of contexts. The present study tests the potential of such interventions in a hedonic context where behavioral change does not generate utilitarian benefits (tourism). Results from a field experiment in a four-star hotel in Slovenia indicate that appeals to people’s pro-environmental values fail to significantly increase tourists’ hotel towel reuse and decrease room electricity consumption, suggesting that interventions in hedonic contexts—such as tourism—may require the use of more tangible benefits in order to change behavior.

Which hotel guest segments reuse towels? Selling sustainable tourism services through target marketing

ABSTRACT This paper reviews and evaluates the wide range of supply and demand side measures employed and tested to reduce the environmental impacts of tourist accommodation. It focuses on the importance of understanding market segments and their pro-environmental behaviour by exploring the personal and travel characteristics significantly associated with pro-environment beneficial change, empirically investigating hotel guest characteristics associated with higher towel reuse. Towel use per day, per room, is modelled according to the number of adults in the room, the number of children, and the type and origins of guests. Observed actual towel use by 204 travel parties spending 480 nights in a four-star hotel in Slovenia reveals key personal and travel characteristics of hotel guests which are predictive of towel reuse: their country of origin, booking methods used, being a business traveller and not being a family. Results point to a-priori market segments which could be given booking preference in periods of high demand to reduce hotel environmental footprints. Results also point to promising leverage points for interventions designed to modify the behaviour of hotel guests on site. The approach and methodology used could be applied to marketing pro-environmental concepts more widely across other sustainable initiatives.

Why Negative Outputs are Often Ignored: A Comprehensive Measure of Hotel Performance:

Studies often overlook negative outputs when measuring hotel performance. This paper investigates the consequences of such omissions by comparing two performance models, one that includes negative outputs (customer complaints) and one that excludes negative outputs. The authors show that excluding negative outputs underestimates the efficiency and productivity results. The results also indicate important differences in the performance ranking of hotels when negative outputs were excluded from the model. The authors also found that hotel size and hotel classification have a minor impact on performance when accounting for negative outputs.

A Sharing-Based Approach to Enticing Tourists to Behave More Environmentally Friendly

Tourist behavior has a critical impact on the environmental sustainability of tourism. The hedonic nature of tourism and lack of an economic incentive make tourist behavior particularly hard to change. Making tourists behave more environmentally friendly would have substantial environmental benefits. This is the aim of the present study. Three alternative approaches are tested. The most successful approach—based on sharing monetary savings with guests—leads to a 42 percent change in one specific tourist behavior with negative environmental consequences. This new sharing-based approach significantly outperforms current approaches of increasing awareness of environmental consequences and of tourist ability to make a change. Tourism businesses should consider replacing current appeals with sharing-based schemes.

Filling Infrastructure Gaps

This chapter discusses the potential of peer-to-peer accommodation networks to fill significant and ongoing accommodation infrastructure gaps at specific destinations or even entire countries. The case discussed here is that of Slovenia, a small country located at the heart of Europe with one of the highest proportions of nature protection areas worldwide. Slovenia is experiencing substantial growth in tourism demand while having serious shortages in tourism accommodation, especially in the main tourism areas. Hotels are mostly state owned and not maintained to ensure quality standards. New hotels are not being built to meet rising demand. Peer-to-peer accommodation networks can fill this accommodation shortage with little need for investment and construction. The challenge Slovenia faces, as it develops new regulations for listing space on such networks, is how to maximize the benefits peer-to-peer accommodation networks can offer while minimizing potential negative side effects.

Geographical mapping of visitor flow in tourism: A user-generated content approach

The available technology enables us to access a large amount of data shared by tourists on tourism web platforms. Such data include the exact geographical location visited, the time of a visit, and the identifier of a visitor. This article aims to identify the visitor flows in the North East Adriatic region. Visitor flows are groups of repetitive movements of visitors through the geographical space within a certain travel. We identified 31 groups of strategic visitor flows between 188 destinations in the region. The proposed methodological approach is unique and had not been used in this context before. By connecting new approaches in destination management and economic planning, we aim to improve the theoretical and practical knowledge in this field.