Designing the Tourist Journey for the Advancement of Sustainable Tourist Practices

Sustainable tourism has become a key priority in the strategic plans for tourism development in order to attain sociocultural development and environmental preservation. This paper examines opportunities for the advancement of sustainable tourism by encouraging tourists to consider sustainability and to include sustainable options in their tourist practices. The paper adopts a practice-based approach for the understanding of tourist behavior as a series of practices tourists perform for the development of valuable experiences, usually with the support of services offered by tourist organizations and service providers. Sustainability is an option for tourists that needs to be offered, promoted, and supported when they decide on their practices and the way they will perform them. Hence, sustainability is an option that needs to be designed so that tourists are enabled and motivated to adopt sustainable tourist practices. The paper proposes the sustainable tourist journey as an approach for the analysis and design of sustainable tourist practices that is based on the holistic scope of the consumer journey. The paper contributes to the advancement of sustainable tourism by introducing and improving the understanding of sustainability concerns in tourist practices. The paper discusses also how digital technologies can support the design of sustainable tourist practices.