Field experiments remain the gold standard for evaluating behavioral nudges in tourism and hospitality, yet they are costly and operationally disruptive. We introduce a contract-aware virtual experimentation framework that combines large-scale simulated responses with small human validation samples to enable rigorous, low-cost pre-testing of sustainability interventions. The approach treats synthetic labels as noisy measurements and applies link-space calibration to restore nominal coverage and reduce mean squared error under explicit external-validity assumptions. Using two canonical hospitality interventions—normative appeals for towel reuse and gamified strategies for buffet waste reduction—we show that episodic conditioning improves predictive fidelity, yielding calibrated estimates that closely approximate field benchmarks (reuse ≈ +6.5 percentage points; waste ≈ −32%). Monte Carlo diagnostics confirm that coverage approaches 95% and precision improves as validation size grows. This study contributes a reproducible econometric workflow for virtual experimentation in tourism, offering a scalable, ethically responsible complement to field trials.

Tourism is frequently portrayed as a catalyst for intercultural understanding and peace, yet empirical evidence remains inconclusive. While some studies highlight tourism’s potential to reduce prejudice and foster harmony through interpersonal contact, others question whether tourism actively promotes peace or merely benefits from its presence. This study examines the role of personal contact in advancing intercultural understanding within the peace-through-tourism framework. Data were collected from 1,300 visitors to the Canary Islands through a two-wave longitudinal design: pretrip and posttrip surveys. Bayesian mixed effects models were employed to capture temporal changes in satisfaction and attitudes while accounting for individual heterogeneity. Results reveal that both the type and quality of contact significantly influence tourist satisfaction and attitude change, with negative encounters exerting disproportionately stronger effects than positive ones. These findings offer theoretical insights into contact-mediated mechanisms and practical implications for leveraging tourism as a tool for promoting positive peace.

Hotels routinely use sustainability nudges, but pre-testing their effectiveness requires costly field experiments. We propose a virtual experimentation framework in which AI agents respond to hospitality scenarios and their outputs are calibrated against intercept survey data from four hotels in Gran Canaria (N = 1680). Simulating two nudges-towel reuse and buffet plate waste (a binary measure, included for cross-intervention generalizability)-under three conditioning strategies, we find that agents given episodic, affect-rich context produce estimates closest to published field benchmarks: the calibrated towel-reuse lift is 5.5 percentage points (field benchmark: 6.8 pp). Calibration preserves strategy rankings and reduces estimation error, consistent with situated-cognition perspectives, though not direct evidence of psychological mechanisms. The framework offers a low-cost screening tool for tourism sustainability interventions.

The unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of living with wildlife is one of the causes of human-carnivore conflicts. The existence of large carnivores is valued globally, but the costs of damages and management impacts human residents. The Apennine brown bear is endemic of central Italy and, besides its ecological value, it can attract tourists in search of nature and wilderness. The Advertising Value Equivalent of the bears' appearances in the national newspaper and on television from 2015 to 2020 was used to calculate the economic value of this flagship species as a destination image. The 11 million Euro of Advertising Value Equivalent estimated largely exceeded the amount of reimbursements sustained by the Park to manage this carnivore in the same period. This evaluation of cultural value could be used to highlight the economic benefits provided by the bear and contribute to the discussions with managers and stakeholders.

The rise in urbanization has led to an expansion of traditional urban externalities toward suburban and rural areas together with changes in the preferences of human populations for noise and air pollution. This paper analyses the preferences of the population living in rural, suburban and urban areas for noise and air pollution utilizing a revealed preference approach. Data on actual choices of residential location are analysed utilizing a Latent Class Discrete Choice model that raises two different groups of residents with different preferences for air and noise pollution. As expected and confirmed by the Multinomial and Mixed Logit models, the first group of the Latent Class model accepts higher levels of noise and air pollution in urban than in suburban and rural areas. However, the second group of residents have preferences for higher levels of noise and lower levels of air pollution in rural and suburban than in urban areas. Thus, results show some rural residents are willing to trade higher levels of noise for lower levels of air pollution, indicating adaptation of preferences to a lower level of the traditional tranquillity enjoyed in less densely populated rural areas.

Stargazing tourism is an expanding market niche that requires the development of territorial resources for its implementation and attraction. This paper’s objective is to investigate the preferences and willingness to pay of tourists for the development of strategic land resources for stargazing tourism activities. The field work was conducted on the island of La Palma (Canary Islands), which is promoting the territorial development of infrastructures for stargazing tourism. A random sample of 734 tourists were interviewed in person on-site in December 2019 following the methodology discrete choice experiments that enabled an estimation of tourists’ preferences and willingness to pay for the implementation of key land resources for stargazing. The data are modeled using a latent class model that allows for the consideration of heterogeneous preferences. The results show that there are three groups of tourists with different preferences for land resources of stargazing observation. These segments are respectively related to the interests in culture, active, and astronomic tourism. Those tourists in the active stargazing segment share the largest proportion of the market and favor the implementation of facilities that allow the combination of active tourism with stargazing. The results are useful for land product development and territorial strategies aimed at positioning destinations in the identified demand niches of stargazing tourism.

Land use changes in the Alps over the last few decades have been characterised by a significant increase in forest coverage as a result of the abandonment of marginal agricultural sites. Natural afforestation and species protection laws affected the ecosystem, and therefore the services provided by the mountain environment, including landscape structure and aesthetics, changed. This work assess the changes in the ecosystem services offered by forests since 1954 in a region of the Italian Alps. Some ES were estimated in this work with GIS, and others were taken from the literature or the authors' previous works. Since the 1950s, forest ecosystem services such as growing stock, protection from hydro-geological hazards and carbon storage have increased. Deer and other forest species have risen in number. On the other hand, there has been a depletion of open space for priority habitats and species such as black grouse and capercaillie. Old postcards were used to understand land use change and people's aesthetic preferences. To determine people's preferences for the landscape, we used records of over 300,000 postcards, sold during nearly two decades. The most often chosen postcard portrayed a landscape of the 1970s with a mix of forest and open space, different from the scenario that the buyers could observe. The sales records for over 20 years of postcard business and the dates of the postcards that we obtained in this research allowed us to perform a quantitative analysis of landscape preferences. The main subject of the photo was a good predictor of the number of postcards sold, according to generalised linear models (GLM); and postcards of overly exploited landscapes, dense forest coverage or buildings were significantly less likely to be chosen. Artificially reinstating open areas will boost biodiversity and could recreate a landscape that resembles the historical agro-ecosystem without interfering with the forest's other functions. These findings will help managers and policy makers evaluate cultural ecosystem resources in the face of changing mountain landscapes.

This paper investigates the potential gap in Tour Operators (TOs) assessments of tourists' preferences for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in tourism. It utilizes discrete choice experiments to assess both tourists and TOs preferences. Results show that TOs understand tourists' average preferences for CSR policies but fail to predict the heterogeneity of preferences. Three market segments were found, with different preferences, socio-economic backgrounds, spending levels, and source regions. The results can help explain the lag of tourism companies in undertaking some of the CSR policies that might be of interest to tourists, and might assist the development of more sustainable tourism.

Overpopulation and abandonment of pets are long-standing and burgeoning concerns that involve uncontrolled breeding and selling, illegal trafficking, overpopulation, and pet safety and well-being issues. Abandonment of pets creates numerous negative externalities and multimillion-dollar costs, in addition to severe consequences and problems concerning animal welfare (e.g., starvation, untreated disease, climatic extremes, uncertainty of rescue and adoption), ecological (e.g., invasive species and introduction of novel pathogens), public health and safety (e.g., risks to people from bites, zoonoses, or road hazards), and economic (e.g., financial burdens for governmental and nongovernmental organizations). These interwoven problems persist for several reasons, including the following: (1) lack of an efficient system for the prevention of abandonment and overpopulation, (2) lack of regulatory liability for pet owners, (3) lack of legal alternative to abandonment. This article proposes a novel comprehensive management system for amelioration of overpopulation and abandonment of pets aimed to tackle the current supply and demand dysfunction of the pet market and provide a legal alternative to abandonment.

Studies aiming at valuing cultural and natural heritage projects are often focussed on one or only a few sites, whereas planning decisions concerning the allocation of public funds to heritage conservation deal with classes of heritage rather than single sites. In addition, such planning decisions are almost always concerned with non-monetary values that need to be incorporated into assessment procedures if the total value of alternative strategies is to be estimated. In this paper, we put forward and estimate models to address both of these issues within a choice-modelling framework. The method is developed in the context of conservation of a particular class of cultural heritage, namely major historic buildings in a city or country. We report results from a discrete choice experiment to assess public preferences in which the choices are alternative conservation programs and the attributes are dimensions of the programs’ cultural and economic value. The model is estimated from survey data using several flexible econometric specifications. We show that the methods developed can be used to obtain robust estimates of the economic value of this category of buildings. We also find a significant contribution of all aspects of cultural value to the formation of conservation preferences and the public’s willingness to pay.

•Reports experimental results on the impact of communication of water savings potential of reusing towels and bed linen.•Information about the environmental consequences reduced the number of times that towels and bed lines were changed.•Information provided personally at the reception had higher impact than did non-personal in-room information.

Laundry is a major factor in hotel fresh water use. Pro-environmental appeals to encourage tourists to reuse towels and bed linen have received much attention in the literature, though findings have remained inconclusive. This paper presents the results of a large field experiment with 21,000 observations in seven hotels catering to the sun, sand & sea leisure tourism market in Gran Canaria, Spain. Findings suggest that comprehensive message designs can increase towel reuse by 6.8% and bed linen reuse by 1.2%, compared to existing in-room messages. Results also show that nationality, age, length of stay, repeat visits, temperature, and hotel standard influence participation levels. The field experiment confirms that normative appeals can trigger significant behavioural change. Evidence suggests, however, that social norm generation may be a more promising avenue to changing behaviour than norm adherence.

Tourism is an industry that has demonstrated a high potential to generate human wellbeing in many countries and regions of the planet. However, this potential is conditioned by the objective of sustainability, which implies the compatibility of environmental, social and economic aspects. To achieve the goal of sustainability it is necessary to modify the behaviour of tourists as consumers. This paper presents the central ideas revolving around the decisions of tourists in the use of natural resources and the impact on the environment. It is noted that tourism, as a hedonistic industry, does not present enough incentives for tourists to perform environmentally responsible behaviour. For this reason, it is necessary to act from an integrated model of tourist decision, in which economic instruments are combined with the contextual factors conditioning the decision making of tourists. Results are presented on an experiment on the influence of behavioural policies on decisions on the reuse of towels and linen in tourist accommodation establishments. The evidence provided allows us to conclude that environmental policy instruments can be complemented with instruments that affect the context in decision-making, such as information and social norms, in order to modify the behaviour of tourists towards socially and environmentally more responsible decisions.

The choice of technologies used to remediate contaminated environments is increasingly made through engagement with a multitude of stakeholders including affected residents. Despite this, little is known about how residents perceive remediation technology applications. In this study a choice experiment is designed to explore ways of understanding and measuring residents' preferences for different remediation technologies approaches using a sample of 944 residents in New South Wales, Australia. Analysis reveals that the residents' acceptability of remediation technologies can be explained by both the efficacy of the technology in improving the environmental quality of the community, and the reputational value of the technology. In particular it is found that residents prefer Monitor Natural Attenuation and Bioremediation to other remediation technologies. In particular they are willing to pay an increase in yearly taxes of $44.60 and $41.15 respectively for implementing such technologies instead of alternative remediation technologies like Chemical remediation.

This study presents evidence on the role of emotions in the monetary evaluation of health technologies, namely, drug-eluting stents (DES) in our case. It is shown that subjects who are very afraid of having to undergo an angioplasty are: (a) less sensitive to the size of the risk reduction provided by DES and (b) willing to pay more. The lack of scope sensitivity questions the normative validity of the responses of highly emotional subjects. We provide evidence of this effect using what we call the cognitive-emotional random utility model and the responses of a face-to-face, computer-assisted personal interview survey conducted in a representative sample of the Spanish general population (n = 1663).

El turismo es una industria que ha demostrado un alto potencial para generar bienestar humano en muchos países y regiones del planeta. Sin embargo, este potencial está condicionado por el objetivo de la sostenibilidad, que implica la compatibilización de los equilibrios ambientales, sociales y económicos. Para conseguir el objetivo de la sostenibilidad es necesario modificar los comportamientos de los turistas como consumidores. En este trabajo se presentan las ideas centrales sobre las que giran las decisiones de los turistas en el uso de los recursos naturales y el impacto sobre el medio ambiente. Se constata que el turismo, como industria hedonística, no presenta suficientes incentivos a los turistas para realizar un comportamiento ambientalmente responsable. Por ello, se necesita actuar desde una concepción de un modelo de decisión turística integrador, en el que se combinen los instrumentos económicos con los condicionantes del contexto en la toma de decisiones de los turistas. Se presentan resultados de dos experimentos relacionados con las decisiones sobre emisiones de CO2 que afectan al cambio climático y con las decisiones de reutilización de enseres en los establecimientos alojativos. La evidencia aportada permite concluir que los instrumentos de política ambiental pueden complementarse con los instrumentos que afecten al contexto en la toma de decisiones, como la información y las normas sociales, para modificar los comportamientos de los turistas hacia decisiones social y ambientalmente más responsables.

Climate change policies can compete with policies on other social and environmental problems for limited economic resources. This paper investigates the potential influence of alternative policies on citizens' preferences for climate change policies. A contingent valuation study was implemented to estimate the impact of observable and unobservable contextual effects of competing polices on climate change valuation. Individuals are also investigated about their endowment of knowledge and emotional reactions to such problems. The results show that citizens' valuation of climate change policies crucially depends on the context-dependent competing policies. The valuation rises as the number of competing policies increases. This increment becomes economically significant when the competing policies are related to specific problems such as forest fires and development. In addition, the valuation also rises with the amount of knowledge endowed by the individual about the climate change problem, and with the experience of negative emotions such as fear and sadness.

Tourists' travel decisions can be influenced by appropriate policies that seek to encourage them to choose travel plans leading to more sustainable tourism practices. Based on using conventional cognitive decision-making models, most current policy recommendations employ market-based economic incentives (e.g. taxes). This paper employs a dual emotional-cognitive decision-making model to represent tourists' choices. This framework allows comparing the efficacy of taxing emission levels against non-market sustainability policies including: (1) environmental information labelling; (2) emotional communication messages, and (3) limiting time pressure marketing practices. A field experiment (N = 509) was used to test the effectiveness of both market- and non-market-based sustainability policies in reducing overall CO2 emission levels by affecting destination choice. It found that the sensitivity of the choice decision to price is overestimated if and when emotions are not considered in the choice context. Tourists' decisions can not only be guided by rational financial calculations but also by the interplay of their emotions or the animal spirits cited by John Maynard Keynes. Therefore, effective policies to change behaviour towards more sustainable practices in tourism can be induced by working through non-market interventions like shaping positive emotional messages (but avoiding negative ones) and limiting time pressure marketing techniques.

This paper estimates the economic benefits of different alternative policies considered for reducing the external effects caused by the utilization of landfills in solid waste management. The preferences of the local population in the surrounding areas of a landfill are evaluated utilizing a discrete choice experiment in which subjects are presented with alternative policy decisions that involve reducing the material processed through the landfill. Various models were employed in order to capture heterogeneous preferences, resulting in a mixture of normals modelling approach (MN-MNL) outperforming other alternative models of heterogeneity. The results show that the policy of moving the landfill away from the population does not provide the most benefits when compared to a policy of increasing recycling in the household. The economic benefits of the waste management policies are heterogeneous across the population surrounding the landfill and so the distance decay functions. Thus, the economic benefits for most waste management policies can increase or decrease the further away the subject lives from the landfill, depending on the preferences of his/her segment and the type of policy employed.