Consumer attitudes towards flying amidst growing climate concern

Abstract

Despite increasing attention on air travel’s significant and disproportionate contribution to climate change, meaningful reduction in consumer demand is nowhere in sight. Taking a consumer behaviour approach, this study adopts Katz’s attitude functions theory as a framework to better understand factors that shape attitudes towards discretionary air travel amidst growing climate concern. Interviews with Australian travellers indicate that the functions of air travel attitudes are utilitarian, value-expressive, and social-adjustive. These functions serve independent yet interrelated purposes. The ego-defense function was generally dormant until triggered when climate change was discussed directly, but then served as a mechanism for protecting the value-expressive and social adjustive functions. The timeliness and importance of the paper’s insights have been amplified by the need to rebuild post-COVID aviation for a climate safe future.

Keywords:

• Air travel
• climate concern
• functional theory of attitudes
• attitudes
• consumer behaviour
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Cocolas

Nicole Cocolas is undertaking her PhD at the University of Queensland’s Business School. Her PhD research is focussed on understanding attitudes towards air travel. Her research interest more broadly is in tourism and climate change. Nicole has worked as a Research Assistant with the University of Queensland on a number of projects ranging from policy responses to climate change, risk travel behaviour and indigenous tourism.

Gabrielle Walters

Dr Walter's primary research interests revolve around tourism marketing communications, tourist behaviour and tourism crisis recovery. Currently, she is working on a series of studies that seek to investigate the impact that Terrorism related activity is likely to have on travel behaviour and tourist decision making. Dr Walters has led a number of industry consultancy projects for both state and regional tourism organisations within Australia and has been invited on several occasions to deliver key note addresses on brand image recovery to destinations that have been affected by some form of crises or natural disaster. She has spoken of her research findings at a number of international conferences and she has over 35 publications that include acclaimed academic journals, University text books and edited research books. Prior to her University career, Dr Walters spent 16 years in the hospitality industry.

Lisa Ruhanen

Dr Lisa Ruhanen (PhD, GCEd, BBusHons) is an Associate Professor and the Tourism Postgraduate Coursework Program Coordinator. She has been involved in almost 30 academic and consultancy research projects in Australia and overseas. Her research areas include sustainable tourism destination policy and planning, climate change and Indigenous tourism. Lisa has worked extensively as a consultant, external collaborator and executive committee member with a variety of divisions of the United Nations World Tourism Organization. In 2010 Lisa was awarded a fellowship under the Oxford Brookes University International Visiting Fellow Scheme in the United Kingdom.

James Higham

James Higham is a Professor at the University of Otago (New Zealand), Visiting Professor of Sustainable Tourism at the University of Stavanger (Norway) (2008-2018) and Jim Whyte Fellow, University of Queensland (Australia) (2016-2017). His research interests generally address tourism, sustainable development and environmental change, and the interplay of sport and tourism. James has two current streams of research, one of which focuses on the wider field of environmental change. In 2009 he initiated a research programme titled ‘Climate change and long-haul aviation’ which has brought him into international research and publication collaborations with academics internationally. His research on climate change and aviation continues to extend in recent years.