Green tourism: A study of young consumers in indian himalayan settings

Abstract

The greater importance towards environment across the globe has influenced the business world particularly tourism sector from both demand and supply perspective. The focus is to improve and contribute towards green solutions through offerings. The role of tourist awareness which affects tourist’s behaviour has been a major change in recent past towards building a society more favourable towards green tourism. In today’s scenario every individual is concerned about the clean and green aspect of the environment, due to which the tourists are also going for destinations favouring sustainable environment. The current study shows that environmental concern backed by green intention strongly influences on moulding the actual tourist behaviour of consumers towards the tourist destination. The widespread and influence of the phenomenon can be seen in almost all tourist activities including business activities wherein one of the biggest challenges is to protect and preserve the earth’s resources and the environment for the future generations without comprising on the ability of the present generations to meet their own needs. Clean and green image of the destination along with perceived values favouring environment protection helps in developing a behaviour which focuses on solving the problem of preserving environment for betterment of future. Tourist having knowledge about environment and its deteriorating condition is more concerned in protecting the tourist destination. The degree of present environment crisis becomes more sensitive especially in current ecological settings. The paper tries to examine the factors i.e green image, perceived value and tourist satisfaction affecting revisiting intention of tourists with emphasis on Indian Himalayan region. The Indian subcontinent draws our attention to the fact that it is going to be the third largest consumer economy by 2030, with young consumers constituting the major share in terms of consumption as well as purchasing power parity. The study thus has considered young consumers while formulating framework of green tourism in Indian Himalayan settings.