Around 40 per cent of leisure travellers are willing to pay for lower emissions flights, according to Dr Dylan Thompson, who co-authored a research paper outlining the findings in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
Airlines have good, but pricey, options available to reduce the carbon dioxide produced by flying, including using more expensive biofuels or upgrading to new aircraft which are more fuel efficient.
And because Google Flights tells would-be flyers how much carbon each passenger is responsible for (and how much it differs from the norm for their flight), people already have the information they need to make a choice about reducing carbon emissions and deciding how much they are willing to pay for it.
While the study found that many people are willing to pay more to cut emissions, the research also revealed there was a huge variation in readiness to buy a more expensive air ticket in order to help reduce global warming. At the bottom end, about 60 per cent of people don’t want to pay anything, while others are willing to pay a significant amount.
The study gathered its data by giving hundreds of participants several hypothetical flight options for the same trip but at different prices, and different levels of carbon emissions, similar to Google Flights website information.
Spotlight on Sydney to Melbourne flights
If the study’s findings are applied to a typical flight between Sydney and Melbourne - which adds about 80 kilograms of carbon dioxide to the air for each passenger - then the most carbon conscious leisure travellers are willing to pay an average of $1.95 for each one kilogram reduction in CO2. While this sounds small, it quickly adds up. It would be equivalent to paying over $150 extra per ticket to remove all the carbon emissions from a Sydney-Melbourne flight.
But, on average, the willingness of leisure travellers to pay to remove CO2 is much less, at three cents per kilogram. Business travellers, on average, are willing to pay 85 cents per kilogram.
Dr Thompson said the main lesson from the paper, titled Air travellers’ attitudes towards carbon emissions: evidence from the Google Flights interface, is that plenty of passengers are willing to pay more to travel if it helps the environment, and airlines should continue to develop ways to reduce aircraft emissions. “There is an incentive for airlines to keep doing this,” he said.
The study used a specific strategy to get around a problem often met in surveys which ask people how much they are prepared to pay to “do the right thing”. The problem is that the questions are hypothetical and people’s answers don’t necessarily reflect the choice they would make if they were spending real money.
- Please explain: Why can't Australian airlines stay in the air?
- Why some people deserve an age pension before others: new research
To help resolve this issue Dr Thompson and his co-researchers - Dr Paul Crosby and Dr Rohan Best - created what economists call a “discrete choice experiment”. Those taking part in the study were not asked directly how much they were willing to pay to reduce carbon. Instead they were asked to choose between different flight options, at different prices, some of which produced a lower level of emissions and some higher.
Just like on Google Flights, as well as seeing the cost of the flight, people also saw information such as the amount of legroom, Wi-Fi availability and the type of screen entertainment on board (whether live TV, video on demand or streaming to their device).
The 401 people in the study were then asked to assume they were making a real decision and had three flights to choose from. Each person did the exercise multiple times, which generated a mass of data about their flight preferences and how all the preferences relate to each other. Using statistical techniques, the researchers could infer how much extra money different types of passengers are willing to pay to reduce carbon.
Dr Paul Crosby and Dr Rohan Best, who co-authored the research paper with Dr Dylan Thompson, are economists in the Macquarie Business School.
