| dc.description.abstract | The tourism industry is rapidly growing and is one of the largest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. Tourism in Norway is highly dependent on the environment and needs to focus more on sustainable transportation to become the leading Nordic country in sustainable tourism. We created an online questionnaire to investigate peoples’ preferences, attitudes, and willingness to pay for leisure travel modes and collected 265 complete responses. Data from a stated preference discrete choice experiment included in the survey were analyzed with multinomial logit models to address several research questions. The overall research question is: How important are money costs, time expenditure, and CO2 emissions for people’s choice of leisure travel mode? The analysis found that the experimentally varied attributes (cost, time, and CO2) were statistically significant factors influencing the survey participants’ stated preferences for the two leisure travel modes (airplane and train). Time had the highest attribute weight, followed by CO2, then cost. Time had an estimated disutility of -0.603 (per hour), showing that higher travel time in one transportation option results in a lower likelihood of people choosing that option. Similarly, the estimated utility coefficients were -0.002 (per NOK) for the cost attribute and -0.010 (per kilo) for the CO2 emission attribute. These utility coefficients imply that the value of leisure time is around 370 NOK per hour and that an average person is willing to pay 5 NOK or give up 1.2 minutes to reduce their carbon footprint by 1 kg of CO2 emission. Overall, our analysis provides a much-needed characterization of Norwegian people’s attitudes and preferences related to choosing domestic leisure travel mode. In addition, it can provide valuable input into public management and policy-making seeking a sustainable transformation of leisure travel habits and behavior in Norway. | |