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Consumer Research
The Travel Foundation commissioned new Consumer Research into attitudes to sustainable tourism in 2006. The brief was to assess the understanding and awareness of sustainable tourism amongst UK consumers of holidays abroad, and the relative awareness of different aspects of sustainable tourism (wildlife, fairtrade etc.); and then to measure in as near to a buying context as possible what value consumers place on these aspects within their holiday buying decisions. A brief summary follows or click here to access the full results of the research. Overall, in terms of the reasons for taking a holiday:
Holidaymakers list their No. 1 reason for their recent holiday choice as follows:
It is interesting to note that "to find out about other people and cultures" ranks nearly 2/3rds as important as the classic "sun sea and sand" motivation. 2 in 3 are "extremely concerned about the environmental problems we face now and in the future"  There is little awareness of the term "sustainable tourism"...Only 2 in 5 have heard of "sustainable tourism" - these tended to be mainly males of middling age
87% say they have not heard anything in the news or press relating to "sustainable tourism"
But there was high recall of specific issues in the news...
The following percentage of respondents recalled recent news about: When prompted to rank aspects of sustable tourism in order of importance, holidaymakers said: (1 = most important)
2) preservation of the destination's culture and heritage: 23% 2) reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and global warming: 23% 4) the reduction of pollution, waste and litter: 16% 5) fairtrade (providing economic benefit to local people): 11%
Consumers' growing "green" behaviour:  We also repeated questions last asked by ABTA in 2000*, and saw a marked change in the six years since in key behaviour:*the ABTA survey in 2000 was to a sample of package holidaymakers rather than holidaymakers overall
Late in the survey we posed a question:
"If you knew that the neighbouring village to your holiday resort could not get water for more than 2 hours a day whilst holidaymakers are there, which one of the following would you be happy to do?"
We gave two choices:
(a) water supply for locals is the responsibility of their Government; I would need access to water at all times;
(b) I would be happy to have restricted water use to 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening, if it meant the neighbouring village could have a reasonable supply.
Despite our offering the "moral get out" of placing responsibility on local Government with answer (a), in fact 83% gave answer (b), being content to have their own water supply on holiday restricted in order to help the local community. This indicates a more unselfish attitude than has perhaps been assumed within the industry. Holidaymakers think that aircraft cause a far higher proportion of CO2 emissions than they actually do Finally, we took the opportunity to ask "from what you have read and heard, roughly what % of carbon dioxide emissions do you believe are due to aircraft ?" The answers were as follows:
50% of holidaymakers (71% of those who gave an answer) think that aircraft emit between three and twelve times more of the total than they really do. This very starkly exaggerated public perception should inform policymakers when they cite "public opinion" as a reason for taking a particular policy initiative relating to the carbon emissions of aircraft.
Conclusions
Broadly, it is clear that there is more understanding of the issues (ie waste, CO2, conservation etc.) than of the term "sustainable tourism" itself, and that holidaymakers are receptive to messages about sustainability and are changing their behaviour noticeably, though there is a huge communications job still to do. Unfortunately, relatively little weight is given to "fairtrade" issues compared with, for example, animal conservation. For tour operators on a practical level, our findings about the attractiveness to most holidaymakers of a hotel "green award" should be useful (though segmentation analysis shows that a small minority (weighted towards lower-spending males aged 25-34) for whom a "four star hotel with a green award" is actually less attractive than "a four star hotel".
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This means that of those who gave an answer, the "weighed average" answer was that 22.4% of CO2 emissions are due to aircraft - this is four and a half times the correct answer of around 5% of UK emissions (and 1-2% of global emissions). T: 0117 9273049 • Registered Charity no: 1065924