Abstract
"Freshwater availability is under severe pressure, exacerbating alongside the ongoing climate crisis.
Tourism accommodations use 350 litres of water per person/day, 40-250% over common households.
Showers are highly hot water-intensive behaviours, increasing energy use and carbon emissions. So,
fostering pro-environmental shower behaviour can contribute to tourism businesses’ environmental,
social and corporate governance. Real-time feedback through smart technology and persuasive
communications have been successful in pro-environmental behavioural interventions. Nonetheless,
their combination has hardly been applied in tourism. Thus, a behavioural intervention in seven tourism
accommodations from Denmark, Spain, the UK and the US was designed. The intervention combined
innovative smart technology, which provided real-time feedback to the guest, with persuasive
messages, which reflected pro-environmental values (i.e. selfless/selfish) and the level of effort
required (i.e. high/low), to encourage guests to reduce their shower duration. The 25,488 showers
measured through structured covert observations and three randomised covert field experiments
showed that shower duration was an average of 13.56% shorter (N = 1,274) when real-time feedback
was provided. When persuasive messages were added, shower duration was even shorter with the
most effective message (i.e. selfless + high) achieving a 21.27% reduction (N = 16,041) among all the
accommodations. This represents one of the most successful interventions in shower behaviour in any
setting, achieving savings of approximately US$48, 4.44 m3 of water, 0.19 MWh of energy, and 33 kg of
CO2 per room/year. This thesis contributes, methodologically, by using innovative smart technology to
measure real behaviour; and theoretically, by showing that the effect of the technology is enhanced by
appealing to individuals’ values, weighing the effort-level required, and accounting for the situational
contextual features. This thesis contributes to further strengthening the business case for sustainability
engagement."