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 subjects 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.
1. Sustainability and marketing in tourism: its contexts, paradoxes,
approaches, challenges and potential
2. Corporate social marketing in
tourism: to sleep or not to sleep with the enemy?
3. Social marketing,
sustainable tourism, and small/medium size tourism enterprises: challenges
and opportunities for changing guest behaviour
4. Which hotel guest segments reuse towels? Selling sustainable tourism
services through target marketing
5. Using persuasive communication to
co-create behavioural change engaging with guests to save resources at
tourist accommodation facilities
6. Improving carbon offsetting appeals in
online airplane ticket purchasing: testing new messages, and using new test
methods
7. The influence of trust perceptions on German tourists intention
to book a sustainable hotel: a new approach to analysing marketing
information
8. The role of travel agents ethical concerns when brokering
information in the marketing and sale of sustainable tourism
9. Greenhushing:
the deliberate under communicating of sustainability practices by tourism
businesses
10. Tourism, information technologies and sustainability: an
exploratory review
11. An environmental social marketing intervention in
cultural heritage tourism: a realist evaluation
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.
