Xavier Font

University of Surrey · School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (SHTM)

We develop a content analysis framework that uses a pattern matching technique and a priori coding of stakeholder inclusiveness and engagement, and materiality, of sustainability reports. Our analysis identifies the institutional logics behind the sustainability reports of the largest 50 international hotel groups in 2014, 2018, and 2021. We find t...

This study explores the power of the story-based 'Most Significant Change' evaluation method to evidence the impacts of a complex sustainable tourism intervention implemented through the cross-border EU-INTERREG 'EXPERIENCE' project across six regions on the French-English Channel. The method provides a participatory evaluation framework to capture...

The visitor economy is responsible for a substantial percentage of the global carbon footprint. The mechanisms used to decarbonize it are insufficient, and the industry is relying on carbon trading with substandard credits that allow businesses to outsource the responsibility to decarbonize. We aim to transform carbon markets, help finance climate...

This study inductively applies the Feedback Intervention Theory by empirically demonstrating the effectiveness of continuous, real-time eco-feedback and its interaction with motivational factors in modifying showering behavior. We conducted a covert true experiment across six tourist accommodations in Denmark, Spain, and the UK, where we deployed s...

This paper examines how servant leadership influences an organisation's readiness for strategic value co-creation through service climate, innovation climate, locus of control and self-efficacy. A model that draws on servant leadership and social cognitive theories is tested by surveying 222 hospitality and tourism business managers operating in Fr...

Evaluating whether sustainability indicator schemes contribute to better sustainable destination management has proven challenging. We adopt a systems thinking approach to shed light on the elusive impacts of sustainable tourism indicator schemes. We conduct online participatory workshops with 19 experts in sustainable tourism monitoring, to produc...

Methods to capture the complexity of using policy instruments would allow us to better evaluate the reasons for their effectiveness. Drawing from complexity science, we produce a Causal Loop Diagram to analyse the implementation of two informational policy instruments in a tourism destination: the Global Sustainable Tourism Council criteria and the...

This paper explores global differences in travel risk perception based on i) attitudes towards travel abroad, and ii) the time required to plan travel. Baseline data from 2019 is compared with data from 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. A methodology based on Big Data is developed through the Skyscanner metasearch engine, working with...

What is the purpose of a tourism journal specialising in sustainability, and how does it best serve the needs of knowledge development, academia and wider society? Now that the Journal of Sustainable Tourism (JoST) is over 30 years old, and we’ve recently had a change in the editorial team, we thought it would be timely to consult with the editoria...

Purpose This study examines the direct effect of outcome message frames (gain vs loss) on cause involvement and the moderating roles of consumers' corporate social responsibility (CSR) scepticism and biospheric values. Furthermore, the authors analyse (1) the effects of gain-framed messages on consumer attitudes towards an environmental cause (i.e....

An increasing number of hospitality firms attempt to foster sustainable practices among their customers. Amongst these, incentives for customers to bring their own reusable products stand out. In this study, we first analyse whether consumers are willing to bring a reusable coffee cup (RCC) under the condition of a monetary incentive (qualitative d...

While recent research on sustainability communication demonstrates the relevance of message framing, research on the effects of message framing on consumers’ emotions is scant. Using the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this paper examines the impact of environmental advertisements (stimuli) on two discrete emotions – hope and guilt –...

Stakeholder consultations serve as powerful legitimising devices upon the balance of participants, the quality of the process and its effective results. We propose a deliberative digital stakeholder consultation methodology based on an appreciative inquiry approach to materiality assessment. We illustrate its application in a four-month consultatio...

We assess the communications of 37 airlines on their own websites regarding voluntary carbon offsets (VCO) to determine the extent to which they are either trustworthy or misleading. We propose an innovative coding framework that captures the trustworthy or misleading attributes of the messages as they are applied to: i) the type of claim (product,...

We study how risk conditions derived from the COVID-19 pandemic may impact on both the desire to travel and intention to visit of tourists and, therefore, on different stages of the destination choice process. We analyse 5134 million flight searches and 379 million flight picks during 2020 for the 17 largest European tourism source markets. An unwe...

A behavioural intervention is designed to reduce shower duration, combining innovative smart technology that provides real-time information on shower length with messages that reflect selfless or selfish pro-environmental values with high or low effort targets. Shower duration is found to be 13.56% shorter when real-time information is provided com...

The relationship between sustainability, competitive advantages, and performance is a topic with no conclusive results in the tourism industry. To contribute to the debate, the purpose of this study is i) to analyze the influence of sustainability on cost and differentiation competitive advantages and ii) to examine the possible synergistic relatio...

Non-compliance with social distancing (SD) measures clearly has negative effects on both public health and post-pandemic economic recovery. However, little is as yet known about people's views on and factors influencing their behavioral intentions toward SD measures. This study draws on moral disengagement theory and the norm-activation model to in...

A coherent and consistent message presented by key stakeholders is crucial for promoting sustainability in tourism, such as the implementation of decarbonisation strategies and initiatives. Stakeholder cooperation and cross agency collaboration are necessary to design and implement a transition pathway to decarbonise our economy, because we require...

The outcomes of volunteer tourism have rarely evaluated, and the sustainable practices, such as equality within this sector, are questionable. Extant research has indicated that miscommunication and poor volunteer placement management can lead to ineffectiveness and negative experiences for stakeholders such as host project staff and volunteers. Co...

We develop a methodology to identify patterns between sustainability motivations, actions and engagement. We apply this methodology to analyse a 3 1/2-year intervention that yielded 151 sustainability actions undertaken by 46 outbound tour operators. We find three aspects that can be explained by the tour operators' motivations to act sustainably,...

Linear logic models are insufficient to understand how interventions work in complex areas such as sustainable tourism. We present Participatory Systems Mapping (PSM), a novel method to develop shared understandings and collective management of complex policy issues among stakeholders. We use PSM with stakeholders in Barcelona to support the design...

Despite Volunteer Tourism (VT) being firmly rooted in sustainability, there is a lack of detailed understanding of how the VT supply chain influences sustainability. Specifically, while recent analytical frameworks evaluating relations in the VT supply chain have detected power imbalances amongst the main stakeholders, little is known about how and...

Workshop methodologies based on overarching knowledge structures are necessary for a shift of the tourism sector towards sustainability. We adopted a participatory action research approach and designed a workshop methodology based on the main tenets and tools of the theory of change, design thinking, and sustainable business models. We tested this...

We aimed to evaluate the impact of sustainable tourism indicators on destination competitiveness with reference to the European Tourism Indicator System (ETIS), a scheme funded by the European Commission to address the evidence gap in tourism policy making. To do this, we evaluate the absorptive capacity of destination management organisations (DMO...

To mainstream sustainability, we need to understand the value gained from sustainability by users. We apply a user-centred design methodology to develop an agile, iterative, incremental and reflexive process to understand the sustainability value proposition for Lufthansa City Center travel agents. We analyse the failure of sustainability communica...

Experiences are at the core of tourism and hospitality. Understanding how to design, manage and measure such experiences has become a key topic in academic literature focused on this sector. This paper presents the characteristics of an optimal design process model for experiences, based on the results of a meta-ethnographic synthesis of such proce...

The Materiality Balanced Scorecard (MBSC) links sustainable hospitality performance management and reporting. The MBSC promotes stakeholder-relevant organisational change. It builds on stakeholder engagement as an integral to an organisation's success in sustainable development and materiality assessment to prioritise issues to define a sustainabil...

Academia is generally carbon intensive. Many academics are highly aeromobile to an extent that is now being framed as a form of ‘climate hypocrisy’. Technological advances are not enough to reduce the negative impacts of flying, and behaviour change is needed. As tourism academics our knowledge of the industry means that we have a greater than aver...

With the use of institutional theory, we study why organizations join a voluntary sustainable tourism association and how the organization–association dynamics change over time. We find a disconnection between the joining and monitoring motivations for the association and its members that leads to conflicting forces and confusion, resulting in goal...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of customers’ environmental concerns, customers’ perceptions of a hotel’s environmental practices and of the hotels’ environmentally friendly images, on customers’ willingness to pay a price premium to stay at environmentally friendly hotels. Design/methodology/approach The theoreti...

We advocate the adoption of more expansive and creative methodological approaches the study of tourism. More specifically, we argue that by examining how individuals narrate their experiences and social practices, researchers can gain an insight into the meanings actors attach to their actions. Considered from this perspective, narratives become pe...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the choices made by the hotel industry about what to include, and who to be accountable to, in their sustainability reports; a process defined as materiality assessment. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on the findings of semi-structured interviews with eight sustainability managers (from eight of...

Most travel trade associations ignore their responsibility towards sustainable development broadly and animal welfare in particular. We analyse the development and implementation of animal welfare standards across 62 national and international associations using interviews, surveys, content analysis of published materials and websites. Only 21 asso...

In this editorial, we reflect on how the Journal of Sustainable Tourism can contribute towards sustainable tourism researchers achieving more impact with their research. We propose some changes that can be tested in, and introduced gradually and collaboratively with, the community of the editorial board and authors. To support impactful mind sets,...

This article presents a grounded theory to explain why some small businesses in tourism adopt sustainable business practices while others do not, even when they share environmental and wider sustainability concerns. It does so based on research undertaken among business owners in Crete. The paper starts by considering studies on sustainability awar...

O objetivo do estudo foi identificar o comportamento responsável de empresas de turismo no Brasil e seus motivos para implementar tais ações. A pesquisa obteve 1.350 respostas de empresas de turismo pertencentes a diversos segmentos, tais como alojamento, viagens, alimentação e transporte turístico. A metodologia foi composta por coleta de dados qu...

Efforts to design and communicate sustainable tourism products have been based on the premise of explicit market demand for sustainability. This study tests whether it is possible to design mainstream sustainable tourism products that circumvent customer scrutiny of their sustainability features, by making sustainability implicit (as part of qualit...

Purpose This research uses the institutional theory perspective to better understand the social dynamics of the European Union (EU) tourism policy and its directions. The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the processes, content and outcomes of EU tourism policy. Design/methodology/approach A thorough literature review involving a cri...

The past decade has seen significant growth in the tourism and hospitality literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Indeed, over 70% of the articles on this topic have been published in the past five years. Through the application of a stakeholder lens, this paper explores how CSR has developed within the extant literature, paying parti...

Marketing is responsible for an important part of the impacts, negative and positive, on a tourist destination. The types and number of clients that we receive, the expectations that we generate, the behaviour we promote, the services we promote, etc., are the reasons why the visitors create these impacts, and all these behaviours are the result of...

Drawing on Taylor and Todd’s “decomposed theory of planned behavior,” this study explores the sustainability beliefs, attitudes, social norms, perceived behavioral controls, and behavioral intentions of accommodation managers and considers how these relate to their uptake of water-related innovations. An online survey is used to capture data from m...

Purpose This research uses the institutional theory perspective to better understand the social dynamics of the European Union (EU) tourism policy and its directions. Design/methodology/approach A thorough literature review involving a critical discourse analysis on the regulative, normative and cultural elements of institutionalisation improves...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jtr.2184 Abstract This article studies the determinants of altruistic behaviour in a collectivistic country. A focus group discussion identified the determinants and their causal relationships. Partial least square and covariance‐based structural equation modelling provide similar results in 605 ques...

While extensive research covers the disclosure of performance in sustainability reports, there is limited understanding of the process of how such reports are developed and whose priorities they reflect. We investigate the sustainability reporting, focusing on stakeholder-related practices disclosed by the 50 largest hotel groups worldwide, by test...

This study explores the way in which consumers interpret and process the marketing and communication of sustainable forms of tourism in destinations, in order to inform policy makers about the appropriateness of different types of sustainability messages. Through a thematic analysis of focus group data, we explore the ways in which consumers engage...

Messages with a clear focus on personal benefits and social and personal norms could impact holidaymakers' preferences towards opting for sustainability actions. This argument was explored using a three stage, sequential, mixed methods study. Firstly, analysis of current sustainability messages from three responsible tour operators revealed a low l...

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 artic...

Purpose The purpose of the study was to examine the relative importance of corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSER) in comparison to standard, price, duration, destination, brand and disruption using choice-based conjoint analysis (CBC). Design/methodology/approach CBC was used as the data collection survey technique, and counts an...

This chapter analyses the fundamental product or service characteristics that inform cruise customer choices. The data presented were retrieved using conjoint analysis to better estimate the relative importance of attributes and reduce social desirability bias, from 441 questionnaires collected from cruise passengers from the 50 calls of the Royal...

The need for sound, progressive policy is important, but the robust evidence upon which to base realistic policy, and the institutional capacity and political appetite to deliver it, are often lacking. This article reviews the link between evidence and policy, and highlights recent methodological advances in value chain analysis which allow researc...

This section of the journal encourages discussion between several authors on a policy-related topic. The same question may, therefore, be addressed from different theoretical, cultural or spatial perspectives. Dialogues may be applied or highly abstract. This Dialogue starts with this contribution and is followed by three comments by Jim Butcher ht...

This article proposes that reactance theory can be used to better understand how tourists’ perceptions of climate change affect their travel decisions. Reactance theory explains how individuals value their perceived freedom to make choices, and why they react negatively to any threats to their freedom. We study the psychological consequences of thr...

This chapter proposes a working definition and a set of criteria for how the cruise sector should acknowledge its corporate social responsibility (CSR), from the perspective that CSR must have the ability to create value to both society and the companies themselves. It also summarizes the key impacts that cruise companies communicated in their 2009...

Social-Cognitive Theory is used to test the argument that the motivations behind sustainable tourism, and the types of sustainable actions undertaken, depend on one’s empathy towards sustainability. Latin American businesses were surveyed about their motivations for acting sustainably and any sustainability actions undertaken. Based on their respon...

Greenhushing selectively communicates fewer pro-sustainability actions by businesses than are practiced; based on a perception of customers’ rights to consumerism. We first studied the gap between the communication of sustainability practices in the audits and websites of 31 small rural tourism businesses in the Peak District National Park (UK). Th...

Tourists' perceptions of climate change affect decisions and choices to visit destinations, which are disappearing because of climate change impacts. Values and motivations are two of the personal variables underpinning tourists' decisions. The study addresses both the limited values research in tourism and reveals unconscious motives by using proj...

This article analyses the use of mixed methods in papers published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism over the 10 years, 2005–2014. First, a content analysis of the articles shows that mixed methods are used primarily for expansion and development of results, and less often for triangulation or complementarity. Sequential designs are slightly mo...

Purpose – This paper aims to analyse the influence of environmental proactivity on cost and differentiation competitive advantages, and to explore the double relationship between environmental proactivity and business performance. Design/methodology/approach – The population consists of all three- to five-star hotels in Spain. A sample of 350 hote...

Sustainability communication in accommodation businesses tends to be factual and descriptive, as companies are concerned with product-based messages that focus on what they do, and they appear not to understand the potential benefits of constructing messages that would influence consumers to behave more sustainably, which is effectively sustainabil...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test whether volunteer tourism organisations are prepared to learn from feedback on the quality of their responsibility communications, and consider whether analysis and communication of results can influence market improvement. Design/methodology/approach – A purposive sample of five influential website p...

The proliferation of schemes to certify sustainable tourism and ecotourism across the world has not succeeded in changing purchasing patterns and consumer behavior due to the global nature of the tourism industry, both in terms of supply and demand. Following the footsteps of industries such as forestry, organic farming and fishing, tourism is now...

Tour operators requesting their contracted overseas accommodations providers to apply, measure and report their sustainability actions are facing a number of barriers when trying to ensure the effective implementation of environmental sustainability criteria in particular. This article reviews how sustainability systems are being challenged by orga...

Ethical decisions to visit disappearing destinations are self-serving and influences feed into self-interest. Data were collected from a sample of pre-, during- and post-visit tourists to Venice and Svalbard, using expressive techniques and scenarios using the Hunt-Vitell model to understand ethical decisions, and the constructive technique and col...

The impact of mainstream tourist hotels on destination economies is clearly an important question for public policy-makers wishing to develop robust tourism policy. We adapt the methodology of value chain analysis to measure the local economic impact of a large, single tourism enterprise, to show how to generate commercially realistic data using th...

This study explores destination stakeholders' perceptions of volunteer tourism (VT) using equity theory. In this paper, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand individuals' needs, motivations, expectations and their assessments of inputs and outcomes. Equity theory sheds light on the micro-level of interaction between residents a...

Volunteer tourism has been heavily criticised for its negative consequences on destinations and volunteers, often the direct result of unrealistic demand-led marketing and lack of consideration for the environmental and social costs of host communities. While some industry participants have responded through adherence to best practice, little infor...