Dr Pablo Pereira-Doel is a lecturer in Hospitality Information Technology, an ESRC-SeNSS Research Fellow, and an ESRC-IAA Commercialisation Fellow at the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. After several years in the hospitality/tourism industry in Spain, France, The Gambia, and the UK, he is now a researcher specialising in sustainability-oriented innovation, consumer nudging, persuasive communication, and experimental research methods, with a focus on pro-environmental behaviour, specifically water conservation. His consumer and industry testing research contributed to developing a smart water-saving technology to nudge users to take shorter showers. Pablo's problem-solving transdisciplinary research has involved partnerships with several companies in the hospitality industry (e.g. Scandic, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, TUI, Hostelling International, and others) and beyond (e.g. Aguardio ApS, Anglian Water, Northumbrian Water, L'Oréal, and the UN Environment Program). He is currently consulting for L'Oréal on experimental research. His research has been funded through internal scholarships, an ESRC SeNSS Industry Engagement Fund, two ESRC Impact Acceleration Funds, a UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund, and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Pablo is the first researcher in the UK to be awarded an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship in the hospitality/tourism field.
Areas of specialism
Sustainability-oriented technology and innovation; Pro-environmental behaviour; Persuasive communication; Behavioural change; Experimental research methods; Water conservation; Systems/services/products design; Biometric technology (eye tracking, galvanic skin response, facial recognition); Open research
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.
The research builds for the first time on the boundaries between two sets of literature. First, the motivations of small tourism accommodation providers for acting sustainably. Secondly, how such providers should communicate sustainability to the market. This study examines the reasons why six small tourism accommodations engage in sustainability practices and how that is reflected on their websites. The study (1) exposes three motivations to act sustainably; (2) reflects on some of the challenges encountered when communicating sustainability; and (3) reflects on how the six businesses use persuasion communicating their sustainability practices. This paper highlights the importance of the message, which needs to be credible, customer-focused and persuasive to be effective. All three aspects score low in the businesses analysed, demonstrating a missed opportunity of using sustainability communications to enhance the quality of the product, improve the customer experience, secure marketing advantage and contribute to repeats and referrals.
Hotel guests’ behaviour is crucial to reduce water depletion, energy use and carbon emissions. In this covert field experiment we assessed the effectiveness of real-time feedback provided by smart water-saving technology in fostering hotel guests to shorten their showers. A 12,06% reduction in showering time (=1,962) confirms that real-time feedback is effective in eliciting pro-environmental behaviour, even in hedonic contexts. Moreover, results suggest that even with no real-time feedback, the regular shower in a hotel may be shorter than at home. Tourism can be a force for good and the use of technology can shape pro-environmental behaviour among the public.
This article reports the effectiveness of technology that provides eco-feedback, along with priming, anchoring and goal-setting, to reduce shower lengths in two randomized field experiments developed in six tourism accommodations across Denmark, Spain, and the UK. Shower length is found to be 13.56% shorter when real-time continuous eco-feedback is provided compared to a control. The presence of messages using priming, anchoring, and goal-setting techniques further reduces shower duration, with the largest reduction in shower length, of 21.27% over the control, being achieved by a message priming selfless values with low anchor/goal-setting, which reflects a high effort target. The study validates, and expands, the Feedback Intervention Theory and, methodologically, uses smart technology to collect actual shower data unobtrusively. This article advances the sustainability agenda in relation to water conservation and pro-environmental behavior change, emphasizing the higher effectiveness of combining technology with behavioral change to foster pro-environmental behavior, compared to technology alone.
