#tourism – BOS

Do Tourists Like Nudges?

By Elizabeth Cooper

◦ 4 min read ◦

Nudges have been successfully implemented in various social settings, as a method of guiding people’s decisions in certain directions whilst maintaining their freedom of choice. A number of studies have found high levels of support for nudges across different cultures. However, the context of tourism brings with it some complexities that might make nudging tourists in particular both more challenging and less acceptable.

The “context of tourism” is, of course, not a distinct or objective place or time. Tourism as a practice is in many cases intertwined with the everyday lives of others, so the same nudges that we are exposed to in our local supermarket may also be encountered by a tourist who is visiting our town for the weekend. What defines the tourism context in terms of nudging, therefore, is that the nudge is specifically targeted at people who are on holiday.

However, existing research suggests that it may be harder to nudge people when they are on holiday than when they are in their everyday contexts, for two main reasons:

We behave differently on holiday than we do at home. We tend to see holidays as an escape from everyday life, and a context in which we deserve to indulge our bad habits without feeling guilty. Complying with a nudge should, by definition, not reduce the consumer’s pleasure – as a result, it is challenging to design acceptable nudges in a hedonistic context like tourism, in which pleasure takes priority.
We can be less inclined to do things for people we feel different to. While many nudges in our everyday lives are designed to guide us towards choices that are beneficial to ourselves (such as making healthier food choices, or encouraging us to save more of our paycheck), nudges targeted at tourists are often focused on the welfare of groups of people (often host communities) who can feel distant. Existing research in psychology has argued that we are more likely to connect with and feel empathy for others if we perceive similarities between us and them. This can make tourism settings unfavourable for nudging, since many people actively seek to experience difference when they plan a holiday.

Studies on nudging acceptance in general have consistently found that people tend to prefer ‘System 2’ nudges over ‘System 1’ nudges. System 2 nudges are more transparent and require more cognitive effort (for example, providing a hotel guest with information about the environmental impact of their stay). System 1 nudges tend to play on our intuitions and subconscious cognitive processes (for example, including carbon offsetting as a default in a flight purchase, so that customers have to opt out of it rather than in). There are not yet any studies on approval of nudges among tourists, but we can look at which kinds of nudges have been tested on tourists already, and how successful they are.

Some Examples of System 1 Nudges in Tourism

Commitment Signalling: In an experiment by Baca-Motes et al. (2012), hotel guests were asked upon check-in to make a commitment to reusing their towels, and then to wear a publicly visible pin indicating this commitment. This increased towel reuse in the hotel by 40%.
Providing Feedback: Pereira-Doel et al. (2019) found that inserting an AI display in hotel showers showing the duration of running water during each shower was effective in reducing guests’ water usage.
Changing defaults: Kallbekken and Sælen (2013) reduced food waste at a hotel buffet by 20%, simply by making the plates smaller.

Some Examples of System 2 Nudges in Tourism

Increasing pleasure: Some scholars have argued that a hedonic context such as tourism requires more tangible benefits to achieve behaviour change. As a result, a few studies have experimented with nudges that are designed to increase pleasure for the tourist, while simultaneously promoting a desired behaviour. Dolnicar et al. (2019) found it much more effective to offer hotel guests a free drink if they opted out of room cleaning, than to appeal to their pro-environmental values by disclosing information about the environmental impact of room cleaning. Similarly, Dolnicar et al. (2020) managed to reduce plate waste by 34% at a seaside resort, by allowing families to collect stamps every time they did not generate plate waste at dinner. If they collected a stamp for every day of their stay, they could exchange the stamps for a small prize at check-out.

Although these kinds of nudges are ideal for a tourism context, given they increase the pleasure of the tourism experience and are also more likely to be approved of, they require more effort on the part of the tourism business. The tourism sector in many countries is dominated by SMEs, which often lack the resources required to implement nudges like this, even though they want to run a sustainable business. There is certainly a need for further research which works towards developing nudges which a) encourage behaviour that is beneficial for the planet and for host communities, b) are approved of by tourists, and c) are not burdensome for small tourism businesses to implement.

About the Author

Elizabeth Cooper is a PhD Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, within the Department of Management, Society and Communication. Her research aims to link the fields of behavioural science and tourism, by experimenting with strategies to ‘nudge’ cruise tourists into behaving in more sustainable ways, specifically in the ports of Greenland.

Photo by Elizeu Dias on Unsplash

The fear of becoming the hotspot of infectious diseases: Who is concerned and why?

By Fumiko Kano Glückstad

◦ 4 min read ◦

Denmark is opening the borders for tourists from our neighboring countries in Northern Europe after a long period of lock-down restrictions. This is good news for the Danish tourism having suffered with substantial revenue losses as the consequence of the Covid-19 crisis. Whereas the European countries are optimistic about the opening of their societies along with the progress of their vaccination programs, Japan in the Far East is tightening its border entry restrictions due to the latest state of emergency declarations.

Recent Japanese opinion surveys clearly indicate that Japanese are concerned about hosting the Olympic Games in Tokyo expected to kick-off in just two months. At a glance, the adverse reactions by the Japanese population seem to be triggered by the current state of emergency in addition to the delay of implementing a nation-wide vaccination program.

However, such attitudes were already indicated in a cross-cultural study conducted for the period 10 – 24 July 2020 addressing residents in the following four countries: Denmark (n=1,005), Japan (n=1,091), Italy (n=1,005) and China (n=1,013). In this blog, I will present some fundamental cultural differences observed between the Europeans and the Far East Asians investigated in this study.

In an article recently published in Frontiers in Psychology by Glückstad et al., 2021, it is reported that Japanese are generally very concerned about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases. This study asked respondents how much they agree or disagree (1: Strongly disagree — 7: Strongly agree) to the statement:

“It is concerning that our community will be crowded by foreign tourists and will potentially become a hotspot of infectious diseases”

as well as other statements explaining several factors, amongst others:

their intentions of pleasure seeking (enjoying cafés and restaurants, travelling abroad as soon as possible and similar enjoyments)
their risk perception (worried about becoming infected, getting ill and infecting others)
their risk avoidance (avoiding larger groups, public transportation and travelling to destinations with high reproduction, selecting destinations with hygiene and less crowded destinations)
their intention to behave responsible (keeping social distance, cleaning up public spaces, using disinfectants before and after shopping)
their expectation for the society to behave responsibly (tourists visiting their local community should behave properly, local businesses should make their community clean and safe, individuals should contribute to minimize the risk of spreading, importance for their local businesses to have inbound tourism)
their attitudes to mask wearing and hygiene (wear mask, feel safe if businesses indicate sanitary standards and if staffs wear mask)

In our recent Frontiers article, we conducted a Bayesian Network analysis (see Fig. 1) which indicates that, in Denmark and Italy, respondents who expressed higher intentions for pleasure seeking behaviors have higher probabilities of being less concerned about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases, and vice versa.

This European trend is rational in a way that the motivational drivers to seek hedonistic experiences are conflicting with the conservative risk avoidance attitudes and behaviors. However, in Japan, disregarding the level of intentions for pleasure seeking behaviors, the level of concern about their community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases stays around 5.5 (at the level between ‘somewhat agree’ and ‘agree’). The Chinese reacted rather similar to the Japanese respondents, however, their level of concern stays around 4.6-4.8 (at the level between ‘neutral’ and ‘somewhat agree’).

Figure 1: Total effect of factors X on the target variable Y (concern about one’s local community becoming a hotspot of an infectious disease)

*Source: modified from (Glückstad et al. 2021)*

The results of our studies clearly highlight an important cultural difference. That is, Japanese who seek hedonistic experiences expressed their concern about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases caused by inbound tourism, whereas Danes and Italians who seek hedonistic experiences were less concerned about this issue, as for the Summer 2020. This difference could be explained by the so-called “independent self-schema” typically held by Westerns (Europeans) and the “interdependent self-schema” typically held by Far East Asians.

In other words, Danes and Italians who are typically based on an “independent self-schema” would realize the “positivity of the personal self” through their pleasure-seeking behaviors. In such a scenario, they would be less concerned about their local community becoming a hotspot of infectious diseases. On the other hand, Japanese who are typically based on an “interdependent self-schema” would consider a balance among different selves in their in-group relationship important and prioritize the protection of their in-group communities. The survey results presented in Glückstad et al. (2021) and the adverse reaction by Japanese to the recent Japanese opinion surveys about being host of the Olympic Games in Tokyo are good examples of such protective attitudes identified in the society based on the interdependent self-schema.

About the Author

Fumiko Kano Glückstad (FKG) is Associate Professor of Cross-Cultural Cognition at the Copenhagen Business School. Her main research interests are currently centered on cross-cultural psychology, cognitive psychology, consumer psychology and data sciences. Her research focuses on data-driven consumer analyses centers on consumers’ value priorities in life and other factors that affect their attitudes and behaviors. In particular, FKG has extensive experience in consumer research on health, dietary, environment and personal care products from Far East industries.

Photo by takahiro taguchi on Unsplash

Remote research: A story about “being there”

By Elizabeth Cooper

◦ 2 min read ◦

It has now been more than a year since researchers have been forced to move most of their data collection online and, where this has not been possible, to cancel it completely. Doing research remotely has revealed some benefits: it is much cheaper, it is better for the environment, and it usually saves time, to name just a few. So, why should we go back to the “field” when this is all over? The following is a story about the importance of ‘being there’ – and about how the things that go wrong can indirectly lead to better quality research.

The settlement of Kulusuk is home to about 200 people and is located on a small island off the eastern coast of Greenland. As I touch down in a helicopter, I can see nothing but empty and dull terrain – different shades of brown rock contrasted against the electric blue sea, which glitters with the even brighter white of scattered icebergs floating endlessly into the distance.

The year is 2017 – summer, although the untrained eye wouldn’t guess so, judging by the snow-covered mountains drawn sharply on the horizon. I have been travelling around Greenland for a few weeks now, and my task is to interview tourists about their experiences in the country, as part of a market research project for Greenland’s national tourism board.

The problem with interviewing tourists in one of the most remote places in the world, however, is that there aren’t that many. This is a problem I have been dealing with throughout my travels, but one that is markedly more pronounced here on the east coast. There simply aren’t that many tourists who have the perfect combination of sufficient wealth and excess adventurous spirit that it takes to travel to Greenland, and most of those who do, head to the more accessible and well-equipped towns on the west coast. Here in the east, things feel incredibly…local. It’s an atmosphere that simultaneously excites me and fills me with panic about how on earth I will secure enough interviews to make my research statistically valid.

I drop my bags off at the town’s only hotel and start preparing for the twenty minute walk into the settlement itself, where I’ve heard there is a museum – and perhaps the chance to bump into a tourist or two. However, as I begin to march determined out of the door, a member of the hotel staff blocks me. She tells me that there is a “piteraq” on its way, and although I have no idea what a piteraq is, her expression in itself is grave enough to stop me in my tracks and make me step back into the warmth for an explanation.

The Greenlandic word “piteraq” literally translates to “the thing that attacks you”, and refers to a cold and incredibly fierce wind that originates on the polar ice cap and sweeps down the east coast. With wind speeds that are usually comparable to a category 1 or 2 hurricane, these storms effectively cut off the island for days on end, as flying in or out, or sailing anywhere, is made impossible.

Overcome by renewed frustration about the feasibility of my research, I head upstairs to the hotel restaurant, where the first stages of the piteraq are already playing out on its huge, panoramic windows – spatters of tiny raindrops are gathering on the glass, accompanied in surround sound by the occasional distant roar of wind gusts picking up momentum. To my surprise, the restaurant is full. As I soon learn, these are tourists who were supposed to be passing through, but who have now become stranded due to the weather. Grabbing a plate at the buffet, I sit down with an Austrian family who invite me to play cards with them.

Over the next two days, I don’t go anywhere – and neither do the tourists. We are imprisoned by the storm, and for lack of anything better to do, my fellow inmates are happy to engage me. I move from table to table, drinking coffee after coffee, and then wine after wine, with all of the other characters who have found themselves at this point in the world at this point in time. I hear stories from the British man who accidentally left all of his luggage (including his phone and wallet) on the tarmac at Reykjavik airport, and, upon arrival in Greenland, knocked on the nearest front door, told the family who lived there his story, and was taken in by them for three days; the elderly Canadian woman who had been dreaming about visiting Greenland since she was 14, when she saw a picture of a Greenlandic Inuit woman who, to her, “exuded happiness”; the two skittish French ladies who mistook a sled dog for a polar bear and sent the whole town into emergency response mode for no reason.

The skies after a piteraq are some of the bluest and clearest skies you will ever see in Greenland – it’s like going to sleep in black and white and waking up in colour. Mother Nature’s twisted sense of humour, I conclude, as I finally head to the airport, with a folder full of interview notes, a deeper connection to my research environment, and a newfound appreciation for going with the flow.

About the Author

Is Tourism an Essential Industry?

Can it really be true that we don’t need to travel?

By Elizabeth Cooper

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically highlighted those workers and industries which we rely on in a time of crisis such as this – and those which we don’t. In a world in which doctors and nurses work extended hours to ensure our vulnerable citizens get the best possible care, workers in the food service industry expose themselves daily to give us access to food, and epidemiologists compete to break new medical ground with a reliable vaccine, the tourism industry has, understandably, taken a back seat. But as we desperately envision a post-pandemic utopia in which we will have supposedly learned from the lessons of the pandemic – can it really be true that we don’t need to travel?

How do we define an essential industry?

So what actually is an “essential” industry? According to the Cambridge English dictionary, an essential industry is “an industry that is considered necessary for a nation’s economy”. Knoema.com has a neat map showing the percentage of national GDP made up by tourism for (almost) all countries of the world, and the figures vary greatly, as might be expected. On a global scale, tourism in 2019 was reported to account for 10.3% of global GDP, and 1 in 10 jobs around the world. Although there are no official numbers on exactly what percentage of GDP qualifies an industry as essential, 10% is surely significant.

In a rather provocative blog post in July this year, tourism academic Jim Butcher argued against the ‘degrowth’ of the tourism industry – a movement that many propagators of the ‘new normal’ rhetoric have been calling for. He emphasised the impact of tourism standstill specifically on low-income citizens, who are more likely to work in the industry. Butcher writes:

The lesson of COVID-19 is surely that “undertourism” is a far, far bigger problem [than overtourism]. From Margate to Marrakech, Miami to Massawa, the poor are hit hardest. The UN has predicted that COVID-19, or the response to it, could lead to hundreds of millions of people becoming impoverished.

As wealthy, Western tourists, we travel in our leisure time, with our ample disposable income and our agreeably emblazoned passports. To be a tourist is certainly a privilege that is not available to everyone. From this perspective, tourism is a luxury and is non-essential. But from the perspective of those who rely on tourism’s low-paying service jobs to feed their families, it is absolutely essential.

**Is tourism just an industry?**

Part of the reason for this misalignment in perspectives is the framing of tourism as an industry and only that. If tourism is nothing more than an industry, then a tourist is a simple consumer, who consumes a destination. The negative connotations of this (not to mention the mental image!) are almost too much to bear.

All industries are essentially about people, but tourism perhaps more so than most, since many of its products themselves are encounters between people of different cultures.

Tourism, therefore, is much more than an industry – it is a social process with a plethora of complex implications. And contrary to the beliefs of many, a lot of these implications are positive. A good example is the wildlife tourism sector, where there are numerous cases in which the conservation of a destination relies heavily on philanthropic donations by tourists (Powell & Ham, 2008; Ardoin et al., 2016).

On a more general level, tourism fosters understanding and awareness, and a world (permanently) without travel is arguably an even scarier prospect than the instability we are living in today. Few articulate this argument more powerfully than Taleb Rifai, former Secretary-General of the UNWTO.

He argues that the reason we care so much today about the negative impacts of tourism is because we are more aware than ever before – and that we should be grateful for this heightened consciousness. It is largely international travel itself that has enabled this increased awareness – nowadays, it is easier than ever before to have real connections with other cultures. And real connections create genuine concern. Rifai argues that this should be seen as progress, and that ceasing to travel would be counterproductive. Here, he’s talking in the wake of recent terror attacks in 2016, but the sentiment is valid today:

It’s very important for us never, ever to allow these forces of darkness to win the battle. That’s exactly what they want us to do. They want us to stop traveling. They want us to build walls, they want us to close borders, want to isolate us from each other and they want us to hate each other. That’s why they’re targeting tourism.

The notion of degrowth supported by ‘new-normalists’ can be realised in ways which still create value for economies that rely on tourism. Tourists can travel less frequently and less far and still provide increased value for destinations. Fewer tourists who create more value for destinations is the kind of regrowth we should aim for.

The argument for tourism being not just an essential industry, but also essential to society, is perhaps best expressed by a quote that is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi (and which also happens to be a strong candidate for my next tattoo):

“Travel is the language of peace.”

References

Ardoin, N.M., Wheaton, M., Hunt, C.A., Schuh, J.S. and Durham, W.H., 2016. Post-trip philanthropic intentions of nature-based tourists in Galapagos. Journal of Ecotourism, 15(1), pp.21-35.

Powell, R.B. and Ham, S.H., 2008. Can ecotourism interpretation really lead to pro-conservation knowledge, attitudes and behaviour? Evidence from the Galapagos Islands. Journal of sustainable tourism, 16(4), pp.467-489.

About the Author

Photo by KaLisa Veer on Unsplash

Making it to the World Heritage List: Envisioned and Hidden Effects

By Lotte Thomsen.

UNESCO’s World Heritage designation of places around the world has the honorable purpose of taking responsibility. Taking responsibility for the preservation of things that may otherwise be left unpreserved, and for which destruction would be a severe loss. Yet, making it to the World Heritage List is known to have both positive and negative effects that reach far beyond the preservation of, for example, architecture. It may change the daily life of host communities immensely – not least in the Global South. The World Heritage site of Hoi An in central Vietnam is one of those places in which listing has led to preservation and enormous change at the same time! The city itself certainly is both well-preserved and stunning. But what is going on behind the facades of the beautiful old houses that millions of tourists visit every year? And what are the effects on the business sector?

‘Authenticity’ and Retail in Hoi An
In the newly published article ‘Retail in Places of World Heritage and Transition: Selling Clothes to Tourists in a Context of ‘Planned Authenticity’’ (Thomsen, 2018), I show how Hoi An’s transformation into a heritage tourism site has led to the emergence of a clothing retail sector that barely existed before. The sector plays a key role in the city’s contemporary tourism industry, and has come to appear as an ‘authentic’ part of the landscape of ancient buildings and monuments.

The paper shows how the creation of a clothing retail market was linked to a well-planned configuration of an ‘authentic’ Tailor City. It is to a large extent a reflection of interactions between the transitional Vietnamese economy and heritage listing. And it is reinforced by the urge of tourists to buy presumed place-specific products such as souvenirs or tailored clothes to preserve their memories of the place of Hoi An – regardless of how few links such products actually have to the place or its history and traditions.

A Retail Landscape of Opportunities and Challenges
So, why is this revitalization of Hoi An not merely impressive, but also in some ways problematic, not least seen from a development perspective?

Well, heritage designation did in many ways boost the city’s economy, making Hoi An one of Vietnam’s largest tourist attractions. And surely this came about due to extremely well targeted and impressive local planning in interplay with the World Heritage listing. It also created much needed jobs and prosperity linked to the tourism industry in the formerly poor agrarian area. Still, the revitalization of the city also represents a development that is highly uneven. It has made certain people more powerful, some activities and products more important and ‘authentic’, and some retailers better positioned in Hoi An’s tourism economy than others.

The paper shows how the opportunities of the clothing retailers vary significantly and are related to their status within a network of tourism stakeholders. A network that is intrinsically related to the ways that businesses and the state interact in Vietnam’s transitional economy. My intention here is not at all to point fingers at the Vietnamese authorities that cleverly utilized highly needed opportunities for economic development. What else should they have done? My intention is also not really to blame UNESCO that acted to preserve invaluable world heritage.

The impact on clothing retailers that are explored in much more detail in the paper was not easily foreseen. Yet, certain consequences could perhaps have be mitigated if international interventions like those of UNESCO are done with more caution and based on a deeper understanding of those local contexts and relations they tip into.

The example of Hoi An surely serves to remind us to critically assess and consider all kinds of effects of interventions locally. It reminds us of the importance of understanding better how different types of interventions – that undoubtedly are essential in their own right and done in the spirit of responsibility – play out differently in different places.

The full paper can be accessed via this temporarily free link: Thomsen, L. (2018). Retailing in places of World Heritage, transition and “planned authenticity.” Geoforum,91, 245–252.

Lotte Thomsen is Associate Professor of Business and Development at the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School. She holds a PhD in economic geography from Copenhagen University.

Pic by Qui Nguyen Khac, Pixabay.

Tag: #tourism

The fear of becoming the hotspot of infectious diseases: Who is concerned and why?

By Fumiko Kano Glückstad

Further reading

About the Author