Environmentally Sustainable Lifestyle Indicators of Travelers and Expectations for Green Festivals: The Case of Canada

Abstract

Festivals are emerging as one of the most attractive events in the tourism industry as their cultural and social wealth can contribute to the general promotion of a destination. Increased desire by communities to behave more responsibly has encouraged more sustainability-focused strategies on the part of festival organizers and have stimulated other industry stakeholders towards such actions. Accordingly, understanding what ecological behaviors might contribute to encouraging festival attendance can be important to planning a festival. In this regard, the main purpose of this research was to investigate real life environmentally sustainability tendencies of festivalgoers and their attitude towards attending environmentally sustainable festivals. Survey data were collected from 849 Canadian respondents who had attended a festival at least once in 2017. Our findings illustrate that a positive attitude towards attending a green festival is more strongly predicted by the level of intrinsic voluntary environmental actions that reflect personal commitment than by more mechanistic environmental activities such as waste reduction and recycling.