How to switch young travelers’ behaviors to be more sustainable?

The current climate emergency requires every economic sector to make efforts and implement sustainable practices to achieve the sustainable common goals. Tourism is no exception, especially due to the size of the industry it represents and the emissions it annually generates. A new form of tourism therefore emerged, namely sustainable tourism, and aims at limiting the impact on the environment. However, this is not sufficient, and it is essential to get every world citizen on board to reach the objectives. Some generations have a major role to play, and it is for example the case for Gen Zers, partly made up of individuals aged 18 to 26. The main intention of this thesis is therefore to find ways of switching these consumers’ behaviors and making them adopt more sustainable tourism practices. In that sense, we started the present report with a literature review highlighting the most important concepts of sustainable tourism, the tourist’s customer journey and main critical points, and a definition of our generation of interest. As a result of this, four hypotheses were developed and included four factors which were expected to have an impact in the switch towards more sustainable Gen Zers’ behavioral intentions. These assumptions were then tested thanks to empirical research conducted via questionnaires which more than 500 Gen Zers answered. The findings from our studies show that none of the considered variables has an impact on the willingness to travel more sustainably. More precisely, this means that communicating around consequences of unresponsible travel behaviors at different levels (collectively or individually), displaying the collective action of others, or playing on the identity level do not influence the sustainable travel intentions. What is more, our analysis shows that being exposed to what others are doing does not trigger perceptions of collective efficacy and does thus not result in greener intentions. Our studies however revealed that environmentalists and travel enthusiasts were more inclined to adopt sustainable tourism practices. Focusing on these individuals and letting them influence their peers is therefore the solution which should be implemented in the first stage. Further research will then have to investigate other factors which could be significant in the influence towards Gen Zers’ willingness to travel sustainably.