Unraveling the Moral Disengagement of Generation Z in Tourism Destination Choice

Resumo

The tourism industry promotes the movement of people, thoughts, and money across the globe. While many individuals seek relaxation and a break from their daily routines at beach resorts, they also crave a sense of novelty when exploring different destinations (Collins, 2015).

A heated debate on tourism destination involves scholars from all around the world and several studies aimed at analyzing the behavior of Generation Z regarding their touristic choices (Robinson and Schänzel, 2019).

For a better understanding of the phenomenon, it is essential to define the following conceptual categories:

• A destination has been defined by several tourism researchers as a “bundle of attributes”, like any other consumer product (Hu & Ritchie, 1993; Buhalis, 2000).


• Moral disengagement (MD) refers to the strategies individuals use, whether consciously or unconsciously, to engage in immoral actions while preserving their self-perception as moral individuals (Bandura et al., 2001).

Since tourist experience can be seen as an opportunity for “context switch”, intended as the rejection of moral norms that influence everyday attitudes and behaviours, the main purpose of the present work is to discover whether Gen Z members are prone to morally disengage in unethical choices when selecting the touristic destinations.

RQ: The choice of the touristic destination is driven by morally neutral and morally exposed variables: decontextualization produced by tourism can be seen by Gen Z members as a deterrent to moral and ethical norms.