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Tourists’ environmentally responsible behavior contributes to enhancing destination quality. This study investigates how environmental fee cues on tickets influence tourists’ environmentally responsible behaviors, providing insights for optimizing this strategy. Based on the goal systems theory and identity-based motivation theory, two field surveys (N = 1031) and an online experiment (N = 361) were conducted. It was found that for local tourists, environmental fee cues in tickets reduced their environmentally responsible behavior by enhancing their psychological entitlement; for non-local tourists, environmental fee cues in tickets increased their environmentally responsible behavior by enhancing their environmental self-identity. Further analysis revealed that, compared to present-oriented non-local tourists, those with a future orientation exhibited higher environmental self-identity when exposed to environmental fee cues, leading to a more pronounced positive effect. The findings contribute to understanding the impact of external interventions on tourists’ goal activation and subsequent behaviors, revealing the important boundary conditions of tourists’ social identity (local vs. non-local) and personal identity (future vs. present temporal focus) in the process of individual goal pursuit. Based on this, this paper suggests that destinations design differentiated ticket price information presentation strategies according to different tourist identities and incorporate time narratives into the shaping of the overall destination atmosphere.
Qu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.