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

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.