Tourism Low-Carbon Decision-Making Through the Avoid–Shift–Improve Framework

Using the Avoid–Shift–Improve framework, this study examines how demographic factors and psychological, behavioral, and attitudinal drivers are associated with tourists’ low-carbon decision-making across mobility, consumption, and accommodation. Survey data were collected from 416 young Finnish travelers, and analyzed using correlation tests, repeated-measures ANOVA, and cluster segmentation to examine cross-domain and cross-strategy variation. Findings show that demographic factors have limited influence, whereas psychological, behavioral, and attitudinal drivers motivate sustainable choices. Shift dominant mobility decision-making, Avoid emergence in consumption, and Improve are most common in accommodation. Three adopter groups are identified as strong, moderate, and weak, reflecting different levels of engagement. Theoretically, the study advances low-carbon tourism research by empirically operationalizing Avoid–Shift–Improve as a domain-sensitive decisional framework. Practically, the findings support segmented policy and marketing strategies, emphasize benefit-oriented sustainability communication, and underscore the need for context-specific interventions to facilitate broader adoption of carbon-neutral travel choices.