Tracey Cohen de Villiers, Annemarie Davis
Abstract
The aftermath of COVID-19 has left airlines fiercely striving to recover and re-establish their competitiveness in a volatile market. The pandemic exposed the airline industry to the vulnerability of natural disasters, including the risks posed by climate change. Thus, as the carbon-intense airline industry rebuilds, it must ambitiously pursue the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2050 net-zero target. Consumer behaviour is identified as a key driver to reduce and mitigate airlines’ negative impacts on the environment. However, insufficient research exists on air traveller consumer behaviour and environmental consciousness, and how these factors relate to each other. This paper focuses on this underexplored territory, by investigating consumer behaviour and environmental consciousness among air travellers, in the context of the South African domestic airline industry. With non-probability sampling techniques, 394 valid responses were collected, and analyses involved descriptive, inferential, and multivariate statistics. Significant relationships were found among dimensions of air travellers’ environmental consciousness and their consumer behaviour. This paper contributes to deeper insights into air traveller consumer behaviour from an environmental perspective. With these insights, valuable suggestions are made to airline managers and marketers to support their post-COVID-19 recovery strategies towards sustainability. In future studies, structural equation modelling is suggested, along with a comparative study of the pre-and post-COVID-19 eras.