Sara Dolnicar’s research while affiliated with The University of Queensland and other places

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Publications (102)


Environmental beliefs, childhood behaviour or habits - Which best explains adult pro-environmental behaviour on vacation?
  • Article

May 2025

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1 Read

Journal of Environmental Management

Sarah MacInnes

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Sara Dolnicar


The Lower Emissions Hotel Room: A consumer-driven and greenwashing-alert approach to making tourism more environmentally sustainable

April 2025

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5 Reads

The tourism industry is not environmentally sustainable. It generates 8.8 % of all global carbon emissions and the emissions from tourism continue to increase by 3.5 % per annum (Sun et al., 2024). Importantly, technological innovation cannot keep up with tourism growth, reducing tourism emissions by only 0.3 % per annum (Sun et al., 2024).What, then, can we do to make the tourism industry more environmentally sustainable? Most approaches are complicated or have uncertain outcomes. Biofuels are in short supply (Ansell, 2023; Scott et al., 2010) and still generate a substantial amount of emissions (Ansell, 2023). Environmental certification schemes have been around for decades (Buckley, 2002) and are more in demand than ever, but do they contribute enough to have a material impact? After all, consumers pay little attention to whether tourism providers are eco- certified or not (Can et al., 2023; Chi et al., 2022), yet it is growing consumer demand that drives emissions.How can we activate consumers to contribute to improving the environmental sustainability of tourism? How can we empower tourists to make sustainable choices and, in so doing, force the tourism industry to improve its environmental performance?This Viewpoint puts forward a simple idea: Lower Emissions versions of tourism services. Lower Emissions versions can be launched by tourism businesses themselves and should be slightly cheaper because the costs associated with offering them are lower. For example, compared to a normal hotel room, a Lower Emissions Hotel Room could provide no single-use cosmetics, no single-use slippers, no minifridge, no daily hotel room cleaning, no daily replacement of towels and the air conditioning may be limited to a range of 18 to 21 degrees Celsius.


Sweet incentives: Reducing plate waste with enjoyment-based interventions

March 2025

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15 Reads

Food waste generates a substantial amount of carbon emissions. One type of food waste – uneaten food left behind on plates at the end of a meal – is unnecessary because it does not improve the dining experience. This study explores two enjoyment-based interventions aimed at reducing plate waste at hotel buffets. The first intervention (“sweet delight”) offers guests a chance to win a luxury dessert for finishing all the food on their plate. The second intervention (“flipper”) involves giving away to hotel guests who leave no plate waste a token for a game of flipper (pinball). In a manipulation check survey experiment, we test whether the two interventions increase positive emotional engagement (i.e., enjoyment, enthusiasm, excitement) and compare stated behavioural intentions to a control condition (no intervention). The “sweet delight” condition passes the manipulation check but does not increase intentions to leave no plate waste. The “flipper” intervention did not pass the manipulation check. A field study at a Slovenian hotel showed that “sweet delight” significantly reduced plate waste generated per hotel guest at dinner. The “flipper” intervention failed to change plate waste behaviour significantly. Findings point to enjoyment-based incentives as a promising avenue for behaviour change interventions aiming to trigger pro-environmental consumer behaviour. The “sweet delight” intervention tested in this study is available for immediate deployment by hotels that wish to reduce plate waste.





How important are environmentally unsustainable non-essential hotel service components to tourists? A discrete choice experiment.

February 2025

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4 Reads

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12 calls for nations to ensure sustainable consumption and production. The tourism industry can contribute to this aim by reducing the provision of non-essential service components with negative environmental consequences, such as single-use plastic items. This study (1) identifies unsustainable non-essential accommodation services, (2) determines tourist preferences for each service compared to each other at aggregate and market segment levels, and (3) assesses the potential of two alternative theory-based approaches (risk reduction through autonomy and gain- and loss- framing of the price) to entice tourists to forfeit environmentally unsustainable non-essential service components. Results from a discrete choice experiment suggest that tourists see little value in most non-essential unsustainable service components and that gain-framing the price represents the most promising strategy to motivate tourists to voluntarily opt-out of such service components. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.




Citations (45)


... Mínguez et al (2021) found that almost a quarter of sustainable tourism-related courses in 83 hospitality programs had no mention of climate change and only 5% of programs included climate change in multiple courses. The tourism academy has also been criticized for its limited research focus on climate change (i.e. less then 3% of publications in 2000-2020) (Scott and Gössling 2022b) and a very limited focus on solutions (Dolnicar and Greene 2025). WTTC (2021) and TPCC (2023) continue to call for training and capacity building to improve and accelerate climate action across the tourism sector. ...

Reference:

Beyond ambition: a review of tourism climate change declaration outcomes and prospects from Baku
Research for environmentally sustainable tourism – All talk, no action?
  • Citing Article
  • March 2025

Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management

... The findings of this research demonstrate that the Random Forest Regression model effectively predicts the Length of Stay (LoS) for hotel guests based on key features such as country, guest type, room type, and rating. The feature importance analysis revealed that "country" was the most significant predictor, suggesting that geographical factors play a pivotal role in determining guest behaviour [32]- [34]. The evaluation metrics, supported by the Predicted vs. Actual Plot and Error Distribution, indicated that the model performs well within the dataset, with minor deviations in extreme cases. ...

Communicating default changes to hotel room cleaning without reducing guest satisfaction
  • Citing Article
  • December 2024

Journal of Cleaner Production

... Exclusion criteria: (1) currently on leave or internship; (2) experiencing major negative life events in the past 3 months. To minimize selection bias: (1) questionnaires were uniformly distributed through hospital administrative departments to avoid self-selection of respondents by departments; (2) anonymous completion was adopted to reduce social desirability bias [28] ; (3) logical checks were performed on recovered questionnaires. ...

Should the risk of social desirability bias in survey studies be assessed at the level of each pro-environmental behaviour?
  • Citing Article
  • October 2024

Tourism Management

... In rural tourism, residents frequently view themselves as stewards of the environment. Responsibility attribution fosters a sense of ownership and strengthens their intention to protect the environment, thereby enhancing sustainable tourism practices 47 . Hence, we propose: ...

Understanding how a commitment-based pledge intervention encourages pro-environmental tourist behaviour
  • Citing Article
  • October 2024

Tourism Management

... Further, by administering two field experiments, we contribute to the debate on ecological validity of academic studies which should be concerned with real-world consumer behaviours rather than behavioural intentions towards environmental sustainability Viglia et al., 2024;Voss et al., 2024). Taufique et al. (2022) note that the literature on carbon footprint labelling "has several noteworthy limitations [because] the generalizability of such evidence remains uncertain, and the estimated effects may not match real-world outcomes" (p. ...

Journal of Sustainable Tourism ISSN: (Print) ( If you want to learn about real behaviour, measure real behaviour
  • Citing Article
  • Full-text available
  • August 2024

... Methodologically, the field has evolved through interdisciplinary approaches and behavior-specific measures to overcome the limitations of self-report surveys . Juvan et al. (2024) emphasize the role of field studies for testing theory-driven interventions, while Zinn et al. (2024) highlight the necessity of robust pre-testing protocols to ensure validity. Theoretically, researchers advocate shifting from compliance to a strategic sustainability approach, expanding beyond businesses and consumers to all stakeholders and ensuring measurable socio-environmental benefits (Dolnicar & Greene, 2025;Ioannou & Serafeim, 2019). ...

An Extended Pre-testing Protocol in the Lead-up to Field Studies
  • Citing Article
  • July 2024

... Within the restaurant setting, food waste occurs in three stages: during food preparation, spoilage in transit and on-site and leftovers on customers' plates (Filimonau et al., 2020). Two primary factors contributing to food waste from customers' plates are portion size (Freedman and Brochado, 2010;Greene et al., 2024;Ravandi and Jovanovic, 2019) and menu variety (Block et al., 2016;Chalak et al., 2021;Liu et al., 2022). Many restaurants purposefully serve larger portions to meet customer expectations of value, which often results in more leftovers and, consequently, increases food waste later (Betz et al., 2015). ...

Guiding people to take less food from the buffet: Two survey experiments that introduce a new simulated buffet scenario
  • Citing Article
  • July 2024

Food Quality and Preference

... Methodologically, the field has evolved through interdisciplinary approaches and behavior-specific measures to overcome the limitations of self-report surveys . Juvan et al. (2024) emphasize the role of field studies for testing theory-driven interventions, while Zinn et al. (2024) highlight the necessity of robust pre-testing protocols to ensure validity. Theoretically, researchers advocate shifting from compliance to a strategic sustainability approach, expanding beyond businesses and consumers to all stakeholders and ensuring measurable socio-environmental benefits (Dolnicar & Greene, 2025;Ioannou & Serafeim, 2019). ...

On the Importance of Field Studies for Testing Theory-Driven Behavioral Change Interventions in (Sustainable) Tourism
  • Citing Article
  • May 2024

... Hotels, for instance, are among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases due to their continuous operations, making environmental preservation crucial for the sustainability of the tourism chain (Barakagira & Paapa, 2024;El Alaoui et al., 2023;Juvan, Grün & Dolnicar, 2023;Mushtaq & Akhtar, 2024). Similarly, restaurants rank second only after hotels in waste generation and resource consumption, highlighting their substantial ecological footprint (Fechner, Grün & Dolnicar, 2024;Jackson & Singh, 2015;Mackenzie, Cheung & Law, 2011;Ng & Sai, 2023;Perramon et al., 2014). ...

Identifying segment-specific barriers to ordering environmentally sustainable plant-based meat dishes in restaurants
  • Citing Article
  • April 2024

... In restaurants, guests are typically isolated from nature in indoor environments. Inspiring awe through beautiful natural views from windows, paintings, or videos (Kaplan et al., 2024), or reminders of respectful authority (Zhu et al., 2024), may reduce self-salience. This, in turn, allows for greater attention to be directed toward environmental concerns and strengthens connections with nature (Jacobs and McConnell, 2022), potentially reducing plate waste behaviors. ...

The power of respect for authority and empathy – Leveraging non-cognitive theoretical constructs to trigger environmentally sustainable tourist behaviour
  • Citing Article
  • March 2024

Annals of Tourism Research