How tourists’ negative and positive emotions motivate their intentions to reduce food waste

Food waste significantly contributes to complex socioeconomic and environmental problems. The tourism sector is not immune to these sustainability challenges. This research examines how both negative and positive emotions build tourists’ intentions to reduce food waste. The study employs two experiments and a survey to establish causality among the key constructs and test the nomological network of those constructs. Results demonstrate a causal relationship between guilt, regret and hope and how these constructs interplay to explain the impact of a tourist’s perceptions of potential cost and harm from not implementing food waste-reduction practices. Additionally, four tourist categories are developed using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). The results of fsQCA identify different configurations of tourists who seek to reduce food waste. This study encourages tourism operators to leverage positive emotions, such as hope, in marketing communications to encourage food waste reduction. A key contribution of this work is the examination of the variable of ‘hope’, and its effect in the context of food waste behaviour among tourists. This is the first study to examine how the interaction between tourists’ negative (guilt and regret) and positive (hope) emotions motivates their intentions to reduce food waste.