Our Assets include a set of resources that we have authored or contributed to. Here you will find more details and links to the book “Behavioral Economics for Tourism” authored by our co-founder Milena. The collection includes some reports, articles and videos on a variety of behavioral topics that you can access openly.
Pricing and Payment: What’s Sustainability Got To Do With It? is a recording of a webinar delivered in collaboration with WeTravel. Price perceptions are often influenced by seemingly insignificant details such as the position of your price or the number combination it includes. Context-related factors such as the pandemic or an approaching holiday influence buying decisions and holiday plans. The sequencing and design of the steps in the payment journey can have an impact on the sustainability choices of your guests. This webinar cover these and other principles borrowed from human psychology that can help travel businesses make behavior-smart decisions about pricing and payment options.
Behavior-Smart Thinking for Tourism is a recorded webinar delivered by the BehaviorSMART team to provide an introductory overview of what is behavior-smart thinking and what are some of its fundamental principles. Through hands-on examples and practical illustrations it demonstrates how behavioral tactics can help tourism companies and destinations optimize performance with minimal investments and high impact. The final part of the talk offers some short cases illustrating the impacts that behavior-smart solutions can produce on the travel sector.
Recovery through happiness is a keynote speech delivered by Milena during the TTA (Technology, Tours & Activities) Forum at ITB Berlin NOW 2021. This talk explores how behavior-smart thinking can help tourism businesses accelerate recovery and adopt a new mission – making people and societies healthier and happier. While the COVID-19 crisis has activated a stronger focus on health and the physical dimension of wellbeing, it is so natural for tourism to prioritize perceived wellbeing, i.e. happiness, too.
WTTC x Harvard LEARNING INSIGHTS: Behavioral Economics reveals how behavior-smart tactics can inform the design of travel products and services that promote the sustainable choice as the most likely choice the consumer or traveller will make. This insights note is part of a series of knowledge and best practice resources published by the joint Sustainability Leadership initiative executed by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
From a Triple to a Quadruple Bottom Line Sustainability is a recent article co-authored by our co-founder Milena and her colleague Dr. Wendy Purcell from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The article offers a new perspective to tourism sustainability in light of the new culture of health and growing focus on wellbeing fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The article is part of Harvard University’s Working Paper Series: Pursuing Sustainability in the Travel and Tourism Sector.
SmartWays is a hands-on manual for tourism businesses seeking to use behavior-smart tactics to optimize their commercial operations and the footprint of their operations. This publication is the output of a collaborative project with Västmanland Region in Sweden where some of the described here tactics were pilot tested with local businesses. You can learn more about this project here.
Behavioral Economics for Tourism is the first book to explore in an integrated manner how advances in behavioral sciences can be applied to the context of travel. The text offers perspectives on how behaviorally-informed thinking can offer a deeper understanding of some of the dynamics in the contemporary industry and can point to different paths and solutions. The book can be purchased at Elsevier’s website as well as Amazon.
Towards Sustainability: A Nudge at a Time is a talk that co-founder Milena Nikolova delivered at a TEDx event at the American University in Bulgaria in 2016. Within the standard TED talk format Milena offers some insights about how and why applying a behavioral lens to tourism sustainability is a smart way forward. She reveals the details of an interesting experiment that shows that one of the possible ways of making the travel industry more sustainable is by removing the most damaging options from the “menu” altogether.
Cost Flipping (part of the Restart Tourism Unplugged series) is an informal professional discussion with a small group of colleagues exploring the idea of flipping costs that would otherwise go towards managing undesired impacts of tourism into investments that prevent the materializing of these impacts in the first place (hence cost flipping). This is one of the innovative policy and taxation models that could be derived from behavior-smart thinking and could help overcome some of the big challenges in today’s industry.
A Modern Guide to Tourism Economics: This Modern Guide captures the evolution of foundational theories, frameworks and models in tourism economics, and examines current and future trends and issues related to new economic perspectives. Milena is the author of one of the chapters in this book exploring the application of behavioral economics to the context of tourism. The title of the chapter is “TOURISM AND BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: The benefits of applying behavioral economics models in tourism context”. The Modern Guide to Tourism Economics is edited by Dr. Robertico Croes and Dr. Yang Yang, and is available for purchase from Edward Elgar Publishing.