Introduction: Understanding the relationship between tourists’ consumption behavior and their willingness to substitute consumption in unusual environments can promote tourists’ sustainable consumption behavior. This study explores the internal relationship between tourists’ willingness to engage in sustainable consumption behavior and the substitution of tourism consumption willingness in an unusual environment and the related factors.
Methods: Through qualitative and quantitative mixed research, this study first invited 32 interviewees related to the tourism industry to conduct in-depth and focus group interviews and extracted a research model based on the push-pull theoretical model (PPM) through three rounds of coding of grounded theory. Then, through questionnaire design, pre-release, and formal release, 268 valid questionnaires were collected using a convenience sampling method, and the hypothesis and its mediating effect were verified using a structural equation model.
Results: Further quantitative analysis and verification showed that being in an unusual environment had a positive effect on tourists’ perception of crisis awareness, safety risk, and willingness to engage in sustainable consumption behavior. However, the results did not support the unusual environment positively affecting the substitution of tourism consumption willingness, the psychological transformation cost, and the fixed consumption habit negatively affecting the substitution of tourism consumption willingness. In this study, two mediating variables were used to verify the indirect effect of being in an unusual environment and the substitution of tourism consumption willingness. The results showed that the mediating effect was significant.
Conclusion: This study explored an action mechanism model aimed at guiding tourists’ willingness for sustainable consumption, based on the environment and consumption behavior, and provided relevant countermeasures for the government and business decision-makers, enterprises, and investors in the tourism sector.
Keywords: unusual environment, grounded theory, PPM theory, sustainable consumption behavior, consumption substitution willingness