Profiling for sustainable tourism: young travellers’ self- transcendence values and motivations

Elena Cavagnaro,Alessandra Fermani,Angelo Carrieri,Simona Staffieri,Nan Chen,Kevin Burns

doi:10.54055/ejtr.v28i.2261

Abstract

Young people seek meaningful, participative, and co-created experiences. Yet young tourists seem less attracted than expected by tourism offers that emphasise involvement, such as sustainable tourism. A possible explanation lies in values and travel motivations specific to young travellers. Although travel motivations have been extensively researched, few have attempted to categorize the resulting list of travel motivations. Research on values is systematized but has limited predictive power because it is generally conducted without reference to immediate causes of behaviour such as motivations. This study proposes to segment young travellers using values and motivations simultaneously and, to account for socio-economic conditions, to investigate young travellers in China and Italy. Multivariate analysis revealed clusters that offer strong opportunities for a sustainable tourism proposition both in the Italian and the Chinese sample. Out of the other identified clusters, some offer similar opportunities yet require a different framing of the tourism offer, while some seem only interested in hedonic experiences. How this more sophisticated picture of young tourists may account for their tepidity towards sustainable tourism is discussed, alongside limitations, suggestions for future research, and a reflection about the re-start of European tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights

There is a growing need for meaningful experiences (Davis, 2016) among young tourists (Vaux Halliday & Astafyeva, 2014), tourism offers that emphasise involvement and depth such as sustainable tourism, still suffer from a lack of demand (Buckley, 2012)
Study’s aim The purpose of this study is to identify groups of Chinese and Italian young tourists who can positively respond to a sustainable tourism offer by segmenting them on the basis of their value orientations and travel motivations without reference to a specific tourism experience
In the face of literature suggesting that individualism and narcissism characterize the younger generation (Twenge & Foster, 2010), this study aimed at identifying segments of young tourists open to a sustainability offer by clustering the respondents by their value orientations and travel motivations, without reference to a specific tourism experience

Summary

Introduction

There is a growing need for meaningful experiences (Davis, 2016) among young tourists (Vaux Halliday & Astafyeva, 2014), tourism offers that emphasise involvement and depth such as sustainable tourism, still suffer from a lack of demand (Buckley, 2012). The literature on pro-environmental behaviour suggests that self-transcendence values, such as helpfulness, encourage sustainable choices, while self-enhancing values, such as hedonism, mostly discourage them (De Groot & Steg, 2008). Narcissism, strengthen self-enhancing values, while weakening self-transcendence ones (Naderi & Strutton, 2014). Motivation is a proximate antecedent of human action and has been studied extensively by tourism scholars (Gillison et al, 2019). This literature reveals that travel motivation is a multidimensional phenomenon, that young adults’ personality is not fully formed, and that their travel motivations are difficult to grasp (Arnett, 2006; Richards, 2015). Young travellers are considered a mystery that still needs to be explored (Valentine & Powers, 2013)

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