Travel footprint, or how responsibly and sustainably do professionals creating and providing travel experiences behave?

Abstract

In the 21st century, sustainability has become a prominent issue in the tourism sector. While conscious and responsible consumer decisions are increasingly prioritized in our daily lives, the question arises whether similar scrutiny is applied during leisure and business travel. In this recent empirical research, these questions are examined in detail in the light of the travel habits of tourism experts. The findings indicate that tourism professionals make more conscious consumer decisions in their daily activities compared to when they engage in leisure or business travel, where economic considerations tend to take precedence amidst today's macro-environmental changes, alongside a preference for compressed experiences. We further investigated the extent to which tourism professionals attending a professional conference on sustainability behaved consciously and responsibly when choosing their mode of transportation to attend the event. In this regard, we calculated their travel footprint, which is consumption-based and solely based on the use of transportation modes. We introduced this indicator on a pilot basis, with plans to apply it more extensively and over longer timeframes in the future, and to compare it across different target groups. Our main findings that tourism professionals surveyed in the research consider sustainability to be important and even prominent in their daily activities, and less so in their business activities, only 11% of them consciously choose the means of transport.