Green consumption intention and behavior of tourists in urban and rural destinations

Abstract

The current explosive growth of global consumption has caused many environmental problems, so guiding and regulating the public’s green consumption intention and behavior is an important issue. By constructing the tourist green consumption model of urban and rural tourism destinations (TAM-TPB), this paper uses the PLS-SEM method to expound the realization path and mechanism of tourists’ green consumption intention in urban and rural destinations. The TAM-TPB model provides better explanatory and predictive power for urban destinations than for rural destinations. In addition, the perceived usefulness plays a significant mediating effect, especially in urban destinations, and the green consumption attitude will not mediate or directly affect consumption intention. Finally, there is a certain gap in tourists’ green consumption intention between urban and rural destinations, but it is limited to the paths from perceived ease of use to consumption attitude and from subjective norm to consumption intention.

Highlights

• The paper studies the realization path and mechanism of tourists’ green consumption intention in urban and rural tourism destinations.

• The paper first applies TAM to tourism green consumption field, constructing the model of TAM-TPB by PLS-SEM.

• The TAM-TPB model provides better explanatory and predictive power for urban destinations than for rural destinations.

• The green consumption attitude does not mediate or directly impact consumption intention.

• The findings will contribute to enrich the theoretical system of tourism green consumption research and provide practical references for the guidance of public green consumption behavior and the transformation of green consumption.

Keywords:

• green consumption
• tourists
• green development
• urban tourism destination
• rural tourism destination

Acknowledgements

The authors thank sincerely to all students in the 2016 Tourism Planning Class of Beijing International Studies University for administering the questionnaires.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Role of the funding source

The funding sources have no involvement in the following aspects: study design; the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; the writing of the report; and the decision to submit the article for publication.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the [National Natural Science Foundation of China] under Grant [number 42071199]; [Art Major Project of the National Social Science Foundation] under Grant [number 20ZD02]; [Key Project supported by School-level Scientific Research Fund of Beijing International Studies University] under Grant [number LYFZ19A003]; and [Research planning fund for Humanities and social sciences of the Ministry of education of China] under Grant [number 18YJA630102].