How to communicate sustainable tourism products to customers: results from a choice experiment |
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| Authors: | Roger Wehrli Julianna Priskin Sascha Demarmels Dorothea Schaffner Jürg Schwarz Fred Truniger |
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| Institution: | 1. Institute of Tourism ITW, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland;2. Institute of Communication and Marketing IKM, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland;3. Institute of Financial Services Zug IFZ, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland;4. Competence Centre Visual Narratives, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland |
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| Abstract: | This multiphase and empirical study explores the best communication style for reaching different international tourism markets and provides an understanding of how purchase decisions could be better influenced in travel brochures. A pre-test experiment evaluated the perceived emotionality and rationality of communication elements in a fictional travel brochure designed for a typical beach holiday but managed according to sustainability principles. In phase two, a choice experiment was conducted to test how Swiss, German, British and US travellers could be influenced by varying visual and textual communication elements in the fictional brochure (based on Mexico for US respondents and Menorca for all others). The choice experiment produced 3006 responses from an online survey in the four countries. Results confirm a general preference for emotionally laden communication styles for sustainable tourism products, while respondents were indifferent to the emotionality of standard product feature communications. Respondents did not show a preference for the inclusion of a graph explaining the product's sustainability attributes. |
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| Keywords: | sustainable tourism communication marketing empirical survey choice experiment conjoint analysis linguistics |
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