Tourism and Air Quality: Factors Influencing the Role of Air Quality in Visitors Travel Planning

ABSTRACT

Air quality (AQ) is gaining considerable visibility within the tourism sector. However, despite several studies analysing the impact of tourism activities on the AQ of destinations, little is known about the inverse relation. This paper analyses the role of AQ on travel planning and the factors influencing it, specifically the influence of environmentally friendly daily behaviours and concerns with AQ impacts on visitor health. To accomplish this, a questionnaire survey (N = 834) was carried out to visitors. Two Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and two multivariate regression models were used to identify the factors influencing the role of AQ in travel planning. Results reveal that despite AQ not having a substantial role in travel planning of tourism activities, the environmentally friendly daily behaviours of visitors have a positive influence on the role of AQ in travel planning. The paper ends with some theoretical and practical implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Air quality (AQ) impacts
• tourism travel planning
• environmentally friendly daily behaviours
• health
• multivariate regression models

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due for the financial support to FCT/MCTES through national funds, and the co-funding by the FEDER, within the PT2020 Partnership Agreement and Compete 2020, for the ARTUR project (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029374) and CESAM (UIDB/50017/2020+UIDP/50017/2020).

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Thanks are due for the financial support to FCT/MCTES through national funds, and the co-funding by the FEDER, within the PT2020 Partnership Agreement and Compete 2020, for the ARTUR project [POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029374] and CESAM [UIDB/50017/2020+UIDP/50017/2020].