Seasoned travelers are more sustainable: modelling the tourism experience life cycle

Mapping a tourist’s travel frequency and behaviour over time (as outlined in the Tourism Experience Life Cycle (TELC)), may be as important as Butler’s Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) as there is a ‘need to understand the life cycle for a tourist’ (Dodds, 2020, p. 219). This paper, using a quantitative approach of 980 Canadians, tests the validity of the TELC model to determine if sustainable travel behaviours increase the more a tourist travels. Two hypothesis are tested in this paper. First, the more trips taken by a traveller, the more sustainable their behaviur will be and second, the more a traveller revisits the same destination, the more sustainable their travel behaviour will be. Findings, supported through ANOVA and hierarchical multi-step regression, show that there is a relationship between the number of trips taken and sustainable behaviour. The greater the number of domestic and/or international trips that a leisure traveller takes, the more likely their behaviour while travelling will be more sustainable. On the other hand, findings also outline that the more frequently a visitor returns to the same destination, the less likely they will practice sustainable travel behaviour.