At home and abroad: Comparing sustainable behaviour and willingness to pay across contexts

Does a person’s everyday behavior at home influence their desire to travel sustainably and pay for it? Testing the Holmes, Dodds and Frochot (HDF) model, this research sought to understand the influence that daily behavior – measured by frugality, altruism, and pro-environmental behavior – has on both sustainable travel behavior and a traveler’s propensity to pay. This paper augments the HDF model in that it finds sustainable travel behavior to be not just a single construct, but rather influenced separately by sociocultural, environmental and local consumption behaviors. Second, this study also examines how these differences in sustainable travel influence the traveler’s propensity to pay. The findings of this study explain that day-to-day behavior at home does explain a traveler’s propensity to pay for sustainability efforts when traveling. Those who are more altruistic are more likely to be more environmentally friendly and more likely to look for local experiences when traveling. Those who are more environmentally minded at home are also more likely to seek out cultural, environmentally friendly and local experiences when traveling. In contrast, those who are more frugal are less likely to be environmentally friendly when traveling.