Explaining tourists´ attitudes to environmental support: a multilevel approach

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to a better understanding of tourists’ attitudes to environmental support when they make their holiday plans. Modelling these decisions is a challenge because although environmental concerns are heterogeneous across countries, they also depend on the individual characteristics of the tourists from each country. This article uses a multilevel approach, using a two-level structure, in which individuals are nested into countries. This approach may be helpful for understanding the contextual and compositional effects simultaneously. The estimates from a two-level random intercept logistic model and the post-estimation analysis, based on non-parametric techniques, demonstrate that the effects of country vary randomly, and that there is significant variance in the level of tourists´ environmental support within and between countries. Regarding the contextual effect, the post-materialist hypothesis explained most of the heterogeneity between the EU-27 countries. The affluence hypothesis was rejected and the challenge response hypothesis was only partially supported. The results from the compositional effect support the attribution hypothesis, demonstrating that the environmental concern of tourists is higher when travelling domestically than abroad.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourist´s environmental attitudes
• multilevel analysis
• post-materialist hypothesis
• affluence hypothesis
• challenge response hypothesis
• attribution hypothesis

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Elena Barcena-Martín and Fernando Isla-Castillo for their useful suggestions. Any remaining errors are responsibility of the authors. The authors also want to thank the support of University of Málaga (I Plan Propio de Investigación y Transferencia).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For the correct application of multilevel models, the upper aggregation unit (i.e. the countries) should be considered to be a random sample of the population. In order for this premise to be fulfilled, countries must have a high degree of homogeneity (Rabe-Hesketh & Skrondal, 2012). In principle, it could be assumed because these countries are part of the EU-27. However, to corroborate the robustness of our results, we estimated Model 3 excluding Bulgaria and Romania, which were the last two countries incorporated in the EU-27 at the time of the survey. The economic and social situation of these two countries could significantly differ from that of other countries, which may affect the robustness of our estimates. However, the results of the new estimation do not significantly vary from those presented in Table 1. In addition, all variables were entered in the model with the same level of significance. For this reason, they were not explicitly referred to in the article, although they are available to interested readers.

Additional information

Funding

The authors also want to thank the support of University of Málaga (I Plan Propio de Investigacióon y Transferencia).

Notes on contributors

Juan A. Campos-Soria

Juan A. Campos-Soria is a senior lecturer in economics and the economics of tourism at the University of Malaga (Spain). He has participated in international research projects for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (UK) and the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), as well as numerous national projects for public and private institutions. He has worked on many aspects of economic analysis of tourism, gender economics and sustainable tourism, publishing several papers in leading international journals.

Alejandro García-Pozo

Alejandro García-Pozo is a senior lecturer in economics and the economics of tourism at the University of Malaga (Spain). He is currently the head of the Department of Applied Economics (Economic Structure) at this university and the head of labour economics and tourism research group. He has worked on economic analysis of tourism, the return on human capital in tourism sector and sustainable tourism and its impact on labour productivity in hotel establishments, publishing papers in leading international journals.

Andrés J. Marchante-Mera

Andrés J. Marchante-Mera is a full professor in applied economics and labour economics at the University of Malaga (Spain). He has participated numerous national projects for public and private institutions. He has worked on economic analysis of the return on human capital in tourism sector and in particular on hospitality industry. Furthermore, he had research on labour productivity in hotel establishments and on labour sectorial analysis, publishing papers in leading international journals.