Behavioral optimization in tourism: from nudge strategies to smart design ft. Milena Nikolova, Ph.D.

welcome to the future of Tourism podcast I'm David peacock stop owning your own contents young leaders are stepping up bring everyone to the table and imagine they're wild anew [Music] behavioral optimization and tourism while you may not have heard of it is definitely happening psychologists sociologists researchers academics and strategists around the world have been working on the concept of Shifting human behavior and tourism for more than two decades behavioral optimization in its simplest definition is using human behavior patterns as a fulcrum in leveraging Behavior change behavioral optimization can make a significant difference in the tackling of complex large-scale challenges Dr Molina nicolova and her team at be smart and Sophia Bulgaria and around the world have been working globally on projects from microsustainability improvements with small Enterprises to Nationwide regenerative tourism initiatives from the obvious behaviors like using messaging to reduce linen use and laundry in hotels to the less apparent behaviors like limiting food waste by encouraging more appropriate portioning through plating and serving strategies human Behavioral Sciences everywhere and you don't even know it good morning Elena how are you good morning how are you I am fantastic okay where are you I am right now at home in Sofia Bulgaria as you mentioned and what's it like um it's holiday it's in Holiday mode um the good thing is that we are now on the other side of a heat wave um so it's a little bit fresher and more human to actually walk on the streets and enjoy the summer period the bad thing is that we actually had a pretty long Heat Wave and it did bring some unpleasant effects on cities and nature and actually the entire continent really I did you've had a terribly rough summer in Europe the South uh the southeast and Southwestern State United States have been equally hit by the heat all right let me ask you about the picture behind you though is that out your window no unfortunately it isn't this is actually a behavioral trick that our team imposed on it on ourselves because here in Europe many of our colleagues usually depart for Holiday early July especially in the Nordic region where most of our work is people usually just shut off computers in July and just go on and at one point it felt that everybody is out at beaches mountains forests and we are the only ones left behind in the office so we decided that we need to do something about it and task the creatives on the team to address that by creating this summer background um which now all of us using calls and it does work because it sets the mood uh it triggers conversation so it has been less painful to know that we are going on holiday later than everybody else okay I love it nice living application of your work all right let's talk about your work I Met You in Sofia Bulgaria in the spring and you did a just an amazing presentation on the efficacy of behavior optimization from simple nudge strategies like reminder letters things like that right through to Smart design um let me do this though I I gave a very brief explanation of Behavioral optimization and tourism just give us the high level view what do you say to your 101 class when they when they come in what is what is Bo in tourism okay I want to actually step back out of ISM and explain that really the last two years science different fields that touch on human behavior whether on individual level or group level or societal level has really made very significantly forward in understanding what factors shape decision making and really behaviors this has helped us understand why the assumptions that actually have informed many of the systems in our society are less reliable and I'll give you a very practical illustration for example the usual assumption about decision making and actions is that providing the decision maker with sufficient information about the different options is the only necessary or the the main factor that leads them to making the choice that's most beneficial for them so you're saying you're saying the individual the intelligent operator in that scenario and will always make the right choice that's the assumption that we that we have been making and uh what's interesting is that many systems in our society are designed around these assumptions so some of the failures in legal systems in policy systems in Financial Health Care Systems are precisely new to that in nutrition and diet even absolutely absolutely so behavioral economics which is the field that really has helped us bring that human realism to understanding societies better uh has pointed to the fact that actually simply providing people with information is not sufficient but there's multiple factors that shape and explain why we often deviate from what is theoretically the ideal choice that we have in front of our of ourselves so we today understand that we have a dual decision-making system we have a fasted thinking system and a slow thinking system so some decisions we make very quickly this is when we are more prone to making mistakes and deviating from what would seem to be the best optimal choice and we have a slow thinking system which takes time it looks at the pros and cons we also know that context is extremely powerful so when I'm the same decision with the same value system with the same same experience personality can then making very very different choices depending on who is in around them what seemed to be the expectations of the group around them what is the environment like um the emotional state of people around them the design of the physical space even so this is why today we have much more information that helps explain the state of healthcare the quality of life of some of modern society the damaging effects of phenomena such as the rise of social media and so on because we now know what are the moments the factors that actually end up shaping our Behavior okay so that's that's from a broad perspective of the world in general and then you said you wanted to take that to tourism you didn't start in tourism you started out as a psychologist and you and how do you how do you gravitate your tour why does the application matter therein It's actually an interesting story so my undergraduate and graduate degree are in Psychology and I was very interested uh during the first years of my uh career I simply had the the chance to work with applied psychology um with teams of Applied psychologists who were using knowledge about human behavior to strengthen organizations to strengthen um the performance of non-governmental organizations to strengthen public private dialogue very very important pillars of of democratic societies um and that inspired me to find ways in which I can use knowledge about human behavior in Practical interesting exciting ways weathering more commercial context or in less commercial one so this is how I embarked on the Journey of pursuing a doctoral degree in the US I went to the George Washington University in the School of Business with the idea of being very practical very Hands-On with my studies and I got accepted into the program and then I started looking for some financial support programs and I received an offer from The International Institute of Tourism studies which is one of the smallest research entities within the business school um to work with them and to as part of a fellowship package the only condition was that I was going to make the supporting field of my dissertation studies sustainable truism and so my thinking was well sustainability I've had some experience with that this is certainly the future of society's tourism is a fantastic industry it's a happiness industry what's not to like about that choice so that's how I entered into the tourism space and what ended up really triggering my interest in overlapping knowledge about human behavior and knowledge about sustainability was that when I started going to classes in tourism policy and tourism planning in tourism marketing everybody kept talking about the fact that we need to make sustainability a principle of planning and managing tourism yet the things we were learning and that were in the textbooks contradicted what would work from a psychological point of view so I was absolutely fascinated with that because I was coming from a different perspective and to me it was almost shocking that it was so obvious that the way that we were approaching uh sustainability was just not going to to to to to evolve into a fundamental principle um that this became my my interest and the waste is for my studies yeah so we're really lucky you went to George Washington University which which has a tremendous tourism school as well so you put your business and your psychology in the context of that you basically incubate a whole new field now let me let me um paint a picture for the the people listening be smart has how many employees 12 12 and they were spread out across the world is that correct yes mostly in Europe okay so let's let's talk about um the you know the adoption curve of be smart sort of technology and be smart ideas you really have emerged in the last three or four years there's a real force and the pandemic certainly like so many other places in the world catapulted the importance of what you're doing is people grapple with every which way to reform their destinations to become more resilient to be more empathic to become more sustainable so let's talk about be smart trajectory over the last three or three years what you're working on where you're working absolutely so we actually decided to set up the company exactly a month before covet over took our realities and of course kovic came and that startled us but then we put our heads together and we decided you know what we're starting something very new something that has been tested in some other sectors it's very very new in in tourism but moments of disruption in crisis are precisely when new ideas and new mechanisms and solutions actually get adopted much faster than in regular well-doing periods uh so we decided to take the risk and just continue working on on the idea because this was not something that we could copy from somewhere or even build on um at least in our context we actually went through a period of trial and error so until we figured out what what packaging or what format of this knowledge would actually work and be relevant to your destination so let me understand this you've got some early peers you're working around the table you've got an idea that you know not just will change the world but can change the world you've seen it in action in other Industries and you're trying now to figure figure out a way to cross the chasm into tourism to get tourism to pay closer attention to the idea of Behavioral optimization heuristics biases opportunities all right so how do you get across the chasm what was your application what do you do well first we needed to raise awareness because our uh my background and also that of some other team members um comes both from academic and research the research space but also from field work so our ability to bridge what we know exists in theoretical science theoretical and scientific world and translate it into what we know will be relevant to entities from the smallest uh tourism service provider to the large destination Authority um was was the the the pursuit that we had we wanted to actually find the best formula for Translating that knowledge so that it can really have an impact um so we took a little bit of experimentation um and exploration and different forms of presenting that knowledge and translating it into practical examples into illustrations into case studies before we even had our own so give us some examples you're speaking you're speaking in the abstract speaking the content yes absolutely so I'll actually mentioned one of the most inspiring case study that actually is from our industry and it's from the early years of Applied behavioral economics and this is um an experimental program that Virgin Atlantic initiated and did and I know many of us think that the aviation industry is not trying hard enough in terms of aligning with uh contemporary sustainability expectations but actually this is a phenomenal case study that shows how an airline was bold enough to experiment with behavior change in very smart and very innovative ways at a time when this space was very very new so in 12 13 years ago Virgin Atlantic in its pursuit of more environmental performance [Music] standards uh decided to encourage Pilots to adopt a series of techniques that could be used during flight that would uh lower the consumption of fuel respectively the environmental footprint of flights and they stumbled upon an interesting phenomena the techniques were very simple uh they were provided or described in details in trainings in manuals in all sorts of Internal Documentation and communication yet Pilots Were Somehow staying shy from them so um that's when the team decided to call uh behavioral scientists in and ask for their assistance and they produced three very very simple uh tactics the first one was notifying Pilots at the end of each month about the their performance in terms of fuel efficiency flying so they received just like you receive your electricity bill at the end of the month you just have a statement um that reports on your fuel efficiency Behavior the second intervention was adding a little bit of gamification and it was giving Pilots the opportunity to set their own goals for next time so they were competing a little bit with themselves which we know is is a good motivator for many people and then the third one was receiving a reward if you meet your your goal and the reward was a donation um to a charity of of their choice um this experiment ran for more than eight months and what became evident was that these simple techniques which you can imagine from an investment point of view are very very insignificant compared to investments in in Technologies and many other solutions that we we employ but they actually produce tremendous results because simply the fact that Pilots started receiving information statements about their behavior um increase the likelihood that they will employ at least one of these techniques by 50 percent the fact that they are setting their own goals increase the likelihood that they would increase that they would use one of these techniques by another 20 and what's super interesting was that the reward actually didn't have any significant statistically significant effect so it wasn't about the reward it was about the sense that your employer cares about certain uh behavior and it's part of the kpi it's now considered uh an indicator of success so you start paying attention and you're more more motivated to employ this behavior and then the second thing is gamification setting your own goals and then trying to achievement achieve them so these simple techniques I think and and this actually example is so powerful because imagine if while we are investing in sustainable Aviation fuels in improving technology and infrastructure Within in what we currently have simply by using smart Behavior change and nudges such as what's uh such as the ones that Virgin Atlantic employed we can have massive improvements or we can cover the first miles of the sustainability transition that we need to be covering so to me if this is employed by all Airlines buy all large Hotel groups by all large store operators and um and entities in the industry you can imagine the impact that this will work so let's look at that so if I'm an individual pilot and I can guess what some of the techniques were long long slow Glides in changing elevation for Speed that kind of stuff so prior to the program they have a bias the heuristic biases I've got to get from A to B quickly I'm a pilot I do it my way did the program create a greater awareness if the industry as a whole in the in the Pilot's mind do you think that they saw themselves as part of an ecosystem and realized that saving you know 800 gallons of fuel didn't seem like a lot until everybody did it every day did they did they develop start to develop that awareness so it the the the study doesn't look at the um it doesn't analyze the the the thinking let's say that's behind it I think though based on what we know from Behavioral Science um what we can uh assume and conclude is that the triggers of such behavior that end up uh uh contributing to the footprint of the tourism economy are very often much simpler than what we think to talk about people's morals or about their ability to see their role in the bigger ecosystem it's about uh triggers and factors that matter in the current moment so I decide to employ this simple technique simply because I know it matters to my employer and I want to feel that I'm succeeding in my professional reality so therefore I am adhering to to the new standard that's imposed and I actually like the challenge of meeting my own uh my own goal rather than I want to feel that I'm contributing to um saving saving the world and that's one of the key learnings that we have now from behavioral economics that many of the decisions and that includes um uh include the behavior of Travelers many of the decisions that Travelers make while they're on holiday that end up contributing to waste to carbon footprint or other in undesired effects actually are driven not by some evil forces or by poor morals they're driven by factors which are relevant to the current moment which are relevant to why Travelers are there in the first place and they're very basic efforts to get away relax get the best best out of the place and so on well anything you were talking to me earlier you said traveling makes it easy to waste things that's one of the problems it's tremendously easy when we're traveling and I think you just added to that when your mindset as I'm on vacation I'm going to relax my decision making I'm gonna take my moral compass I'm going to park it by the beach for a while so I can get some rest then we're actually more susceptible to bad behaviors and probably less susceptible to our to our Urban behaviors absolutely and we actually release controls so the idea that if we focus on bringing the really responsible um sustainable mindful Travelers this is going to really shift the footprint of our tourism economy does not really hold under the behavioral principles because even people who are very diligent about living healthy consuming responsibly at home when they travel they actually deviate from these principles they are going to skip a run or two they're going to have an extra dessert than they usually would uh they're going to be a little bit less lenient towards Recycling and maybe overusing water or energy simply because this is how our Leisure mode works because we're human not because when we are bad or good this is simply so our we're both fans of Danny cadem and the slow Thinking Fast thinking so we're saying that our heuristics our biases actually shift on a state dependent situation absolutely and the one you point out really well is when we're in the context of other people our biases change and quite often based on the influence of those people absolutely so context actually is extremely powerful who is around us what others are doing what seems to be the easier or the more likely option what seems to be the choice of of the others very often become the the key factors that Define what we're going to go for rather than our morals or our sense that we are contributing to saving the the Earth okay I could talk to you forever but we're on a timetable here a couple things we've got we got roughly 800 900 destinations in the world listening so let's talk about a couple things as we as we close this at one I do want you to hit on the two levels of Behavioral change that you that you really do uh focus on and be smart and that's the simple smart chain and the Strategic Behavior changes touch on both of those and then let's give our listeners some context around tourism as to where they can start thinking about this in their own destinations who they can talk to because that's the idea right Behavior change so absolutely over to you so when we talk about using knowledgeable Behavior change in the context of travel and specifically sustainability and climate action we look at two opportunities or two levels in which we can apply this the first one is we usually refer that as the first mile these are smart simple low investment uh disruption-free changes that we can bring into the way that we do things the way that we present things the way that we call things sometimes or describe things that can make shifts in the way that our workers or our Travelers behave the the Virgin Atlantic example is a brilliant illustration of that simply providing people with some extra information before they get on the uh on the plane or at the end of the month presenting people is the hotel towel thing a simple smart change for a smile is that absolutely this is a brilliant illustration of what is the first uh the first mile Behavior change this is when we make changes in default options such as making towel change changing switching the default options in towel changing so shifting from towels are changed every day by default two towels are not changed by default and you have to actually be proactive if you want your towel change now note that we are not eliminating choices The Traveler and the client still have the option it's just that we are setting the more responsible option as the default and the really powerful aspect of this is that many people don't care about these small choices because they don't really have a significant contribution on the value of their experience on the quality of their experience so they don't care about that and so they would automatically shift to what is set as the default without any effect on the overall experience in fact they might actually appreciate that you're making it easy for them to be responsible and to be contributing to um to a lower footprint okay so that's that's single smart changes absolutely so these are the first mile simple and smart changes now Behavior change is even more more powerful when it's combined with other tools such as policy design infrastructure investment planning and marketing so this is when we use um behavioral scientists or knowledge about how people change Behavior how they decide and act in certain contexts in order to inform or complement uh decision making when it comes to new destination strategies when it comes to investing in infrastructure for example that's going to encourage more of the local residents and more visitors to walk from places rather than keep using authorized vehicles or to to to travel in slower mode or to spend more locally so this is when we combine different tools that we have on a strategic level and we look to create patterns that slowly shift the behaviors of larger groups over time so that we can get them to behave in a more desired way okay so behavioral changes whether it's simple and smart or strategic can you affect a traveler's happiness last thought absolutely this is actually one of the the favorite topics um of our team because especially after covet our societies um have increased their Awareness on the importance of human well-being both physical and um psychological well-being and the sense of happiness and tourism really is one of the best positioned Industries in terms of contributing to human and to individual and societal happiness there's very easy things that we can do as professionals as service providers as destination managers in our work that can make Travelers live happier not only with a better experience from our destination but actually happier human beings so I think that this is a space where we have huge potential to growth and a great opportunity to contribute to the betterment of societies Dr Nick a little bit it is always a great pleasure to talk to you from from the moment I met you we could spend hours on this let's do it again um this is a I wouldn't call it an emerging field it's been around for a while but it's emerging into the awareness of the general population and tourism and I think it's got a massive contribution to make especially as we tackle the sustainability issues so I thank you for being here I look forward to talking to you more um any final thoughts to our listeners uh I just want to thank you for the opportunity to be here uh I also think that it's emerging and uh there's uh really many many directions in which we can benefit from from this knowledge and now we have some practical case studies and some learnings from uh bold destinations that have given it a try and have benefited from this what I would love to see more professionals uh from destination authorities try is to explore what uh Behavioral Sciences can bring to them as professionals how it can enhance uh the efforts that they're already making and how it can support their destination ecosystems the businesses the service providers the local residents in benefiting more from uh from tourism it's powerful and it's also intellectually very interesting and exciting it's super interesting all right we will throw a link in the blog as well but for those who are listening it's Behavior smart behavior-smart.com and behavior is spelled the American way b-e-h-a-v-i-o-r Behavior Dash smart uh.com have a look um thanks Melinda it's a real pleasure we'll talk again thank you so much absolutely looking forward to it

2023-09-26 18:53

Other news