Understanding Responsibility from the Tourist’s Perspective: A Hotel Context

Authors

  • Petra Zabukovec Baruca University of Primorska Faculty of Tourism Studies - Turistica
  • Zlatko Jančič University of Ljubljana Faculty of Social Sciences
  • Aleksandra Brezovec University of Primorska Faculty of Tourism Studies - Turistica

Abstract

Understanding responsible tourist behaviour is critical for tourism operators if they expect both economic and environmental benefits. Despite decades of academic and practical study of responsibility for the natural and social environment, it is still unclear who is responsible for improving the situation in terms of sustainable development. This requires a deeper understanding of the concept of individual responsibility, which has a behavioural, ethical, and response basis, that will be addressed in this paper. In a hotel context, we explore the concept of individual responsibility in the role of tourists’ ability to improve the state of the environment through changes in awareness and behaviour. Based on the relevant theories presented, we defined individual responsibility as a construct divided into four dimensions: personal responsibility or norms (ethics and morals), awareness and knowledge, preference, and action-based responsible behaviour. Significant results on tourist responsibility were obtained by factor analysis and a hierarchical clustering method to identify three different types of responsible tourists. We labelled them as actively responsible, pragmatically responsible, and irresponsible tourists. The identified differences among the three types of (ir)responsible tourists allow for a better understanding of their motives and expectations, as well as better design of sustainable practices by tourism providers.

Keywords: individual responsibility, tourist behaviour, hotel, sustainable tourism

Author Biographies

Petra Zabukovec Baruca, University of Primorska Faculty of Tourism Studies - Turistica

Petra Zabukovec Baruca, Ph.D - is an associate professor at the Faculty of Tourism Studies at the University of Primorska. Her research focuses on hospitality and tourism including tourism responsibility, communication, and marketing. Her research and teaching is based on twenty years of professional experience in the hospitality industry in the areas of hotel management, quality, communication, media and marketing.

Zlatko Jančič, University of Ljubljana Faculty of Social Sciences

Zlatko Jančič, Ph.D-  is a retired full professor, co-founder of Marketing Communications and Public Relations Chair at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He still teaches Marketing Relationships and Strategic Marketing courses.  Prof. Jancic is an author, co- author and editor of various Slovenian books on marketing and advertising.

Aleksandra Brezovec, University of Primorska Faculty of Tourism Studies - Turistica

Aleksandra Brezovec, Ph. D - is an associate professor of marketing communications at the Faculty of Tourism Studies, University of Primorska, Slovenia. Her research is focused on the fields of visitor studies and destination development. She is a member of UNESCO Chair »Culture, Tourism, Development« at Paris1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University.

Downloads

Published

2022-08-31

How to Cite

Zabukovec Baruca, P., Jančič, Z., & Brezovec, A. (2022). Understanding Responsibility from the Tourist’s Perspective: A Hotel Context. Academica Turistica - Tourism and Innovation Journal, 15(2). Retrieved from https://academica.turistica.si/index.php/AT-TIJ/article/view/360

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2022)

Section

Articles

License

1. Copyright

Copyright for all articles published in Academica Turistica - Tourism and Innovation Journal is held by individual authors. Authors are themselves responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyright material from other sources.

Upon acceptance of an article, authors will be asked to complete the Publication Agreement and Copyright Licence, based on the Open Access Model Publishing Agreement.

Articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

Under the terms of this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. They can archive the pre-print and post-print or publisher's version of their work. They will, however, assign to Academica Turistica - Tourism and Innovation Journal (AT–TIJ) the permanent right to electronically distribute their manuscript and, after it has appeared in AT–TIJ, they may republish their text as long as they clearly acknowledge AT–TIJ as the place of the original publication.


2. Author Fees

Article submission, processing and/or publishing fees are not charged.