Tourism marketing has typically been seen as exploitative and fuelling hedonistic consumerism. Sustainability marketing can, however, use marketing skills and techniques to good purpose, by understanding market needs, designing more sustainable products and identifying more persuasive methods of communication to bring behavioural change. This book summarises the latest research on the theories, methods and results of marketing that seeks to make tourist destinations better places to live in, and better places to visit. It shares evidence on the motivations, mechanisms and barriers that businesses encounter, and on successes in changing consumer behaviour and pursuing sustainability goals. Particular attention is given to the methodologies of sustainable tourism marketing, to the subject’s breadth and complexity, and to its many innovations. Further research is called for to fully understand what contextual aspects influence these pro-sustainability interventions to achieve which outcomes in other settings, in order to validate some of the exploratory studies discussed, and establish the feasibility of scaling up pilot studies for more general use.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
- Sustainability and marketing in tourism: its contexts, paradoxes, approaches, challenges and potential
Xavier Font & Scott McCabe - Corporate social marketing in tourism: to sleep or not to sleep with the enemy?
V. Dao Truong & C. Michael Hall - Social marketing, sustainable tourism, and small/medium size tourism enterprises: challenges and opportunities for changing guest behaviour
D. Scott Borden, Tim Coles & Gareth Shaw - Which hotel guest segments reuse towels? Selling sustainable tourism services through target marketing
Ljubica Knezevic Cvelbar, Bettina Grün & Sara Dolnicar - Using persuasive communication to co-create behavioural change – engaging with guests to save resources at tourist accommodation facilities
C. Warren, S. Becken & A. Coghlan - Improving carbon offsetting appeals in online airplane ticket purchasing: testing new messages, and using new test methods
Nazila Babakhani, Brent W. Ritchie & Sara Dolnicar - The influence of trust perceptions on German tourists’ intention to book a sustainable hotel: a new approach to analysing marketing information
Sindhuri Ponnapureddy, Julianna Priskin, Timo Ohnmacht, Friederike Vinzenz & Werner Wirth - The role of travel agents’ ethical concerns when brokering information in the marketing and sale of sustainable tourism
Alexa Mossaz & Alexandra Coghlan - Greenhushing: the deliberate under communicating of sustainability practices by tourism businesses
Xavier Font, Islam Elgammal & Ian Lamond - Tourism, information technologies and sustainability: an exploratory review
Stefan Gössling - An environmental social marketing intervention in cultural heritage tourism: a realist evaluation
Diana Gregory-Smith, Victoria K. Wells, Danae Manika & David J. McElroy
Biography
Xavier Font is Professor of Sustainability Marketing at the University of Surrey, UK.
Scott McCabe is Professor in Marketing and Tourism at the University of Nottingham, UK.