Publication details
From runways to railways: What's holding us back from greener travel?
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Tourist travel is a major contributor to the environmental impacts of tourism, making transport mode choice a critical component of sustainable tourism development (Gross and Grimm, 2018). While high-speed rail (HSR) is frequently promoted as a low-carbon alternative to short and medium-haul flights, its uptake among tourists remains limited, suggesting that behavioural barriers play an important role beyond traditional cost and time considerations. This paper investigates how tourists choose transport modes for leisure travel and identifies individual barriers that hinder a shift towards greener travel options. The analysis is based on a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted in two contrasting tourism markets: the Czech Republic and mainland France. The design captures differences in tourists’ experience with HSR, allowing comparison between a context where HSR use is largely hypothetical and one where it is well established. Respondents choose between high-speed rail, air travel, and bus transport for a hypothetical cross-border holiday trip of approximately 500 km within the EU. The analysis explicitly adopts a tourist-centred perspective, acknowledging that transport decisions differ across traveller profiles, life situations, and attitudes. Choice scenarios vary in price, travel time, frequency of connections, accessibility of stations or airports, risk of delays, and comfort, including digital services such as onboard Wi-Fi. By explicitly incorporating comfort, reliability perceptions, and last-mile accessibility, factors often overlooked in tourism mobility research (Gutiérrez et al., 2019; Hergesell, 2017), the study moves beyond purely infrastructural or supply-side analyses. The inclusion of bus transport further enables identification of substitution patterns and perceived trade-offs relevant for tourist decision-making. Data collection is field based at transport hubs and on-board trains. The results aim to inform sustainable tourism policy by identifying which transport attributes most strongly influence tourists’ willingness to adopt greener travel modes, with relevance for demand-side measures supporting modal shift. |
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