Visitors’ behavioural intention towards an episode of air pollution: a segmentation analysis

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing influence of air pollution on people’s behaviour, little attention has been given to visitors’ behavioural intentions towards air pollution episodes. Understanding visitors’ behaviours is crucial in developing effective marketing strategies and preventing damaging consequences for both visitors and destinations. This paper presents a segmentation analysis based on visitors’ behavioural intentions towards a hypothetical episode of air pollution, based on a visitor survey (N = 625) applied over the Central Region of Portugal. Two clusters with different behavioural intentions were obtained. Differences were found between groups regarding attitudes towards the environment, risk perceptions, travel behaviour and sociodemographic profile.

KEYWORDS:

• Air pollution
• behavioural intentions
• adaptive behaviours
• market segmentation
• cluster analysis
• attitudes towards the environment
• risk perceptions
• travel behaviour
• destination marketing
• Portugal

Acknowledgments

Thanks for the financial support are due to FCT/MCTES through national funds, and the co-funding by FEDER, within the PT2020 Partnership Agreement and Compete 2020, for the ARTUR project (POCI-010145-FEDER-029374) and CESAM (UIDB/50017/2020+UIDP/50017/2020)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).