As overtourism grows, Purdue Hospitality and Tourism Management researchers offer a path forward through Travel with Care

Written By: Rebecca Hoffa, rhoffa@purdue.edu

From the Canary Islands to Glacier National Park to Antarctica, Fodor’s No List continues to grow in 2026 as more destinations experience strain on their land and local resources from tourism.

Travel with Care, developed by the Sustainable Tourism and Responsible Travel lab in the Purdue University White Lodging-J.W. Marriott School of Hospitality and Tourism Management in collaboration with the Miles Partnership and other industry supporters and sponsors, aims to help these destinations experiencing overtourism. The initiative serves destination marketing organizations (DMOs) with messaging and resources that empower people to be good visitors in their communities. The collaboration provides a venue for the strong academic work at Purdue and beyond to be translated to DMOs and ultimately to individuals who will be traveling.

“We partnered with Miles Partnership because we care about making sure that when people travel, they travel in a responsible way,” said Jonathon Day, associate professor of hospitality and tourism management in the College of Health and Human Sciences, who leads the effort at Purdue. “Quite often when we’re talking about sustainability, it’s all about what does the hotel have to do, and what does the community have to do? But our particular focus in this project is how can we help visitors travel better?”

Simplifying Sustainable Tourism

Jonathon Day(Photo provided)

Alongside graduate students Ailin Fei, who is wrapping up her dissertation, and Roya Alavipour, Day is working to ensure the best resources and information are available to DMOs in a way that will set the communities up for success in encouraging visitors to leave things better than they found them.

“One of our goals when we got together to collaborate on this was that we wanted to make sure the very best academic research was finding its way into the inboxes of our industry,” Day said. “We’ve been very deliberate — and you’ll see some examples on the website — of taking complex data, complex research ideas, and making them accessible to the industry. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of with the website because no one else is doing it in the way that we are.”

While Day and his lab are still working on ways to measure the benefits of the Travel with Care approach, they have seen anecdotal evidence of the difference these resources are making for the communities they’re serving.

“Part of our research agenda as we’re going forward is how can we help these destinations to be able to measure the benefit of it?” Day said. “So, it’s sort of like the step before the step. As we move into the next stage of this, that’s what we’re working with the destinations on — to help them to be able to measure what they’ve got and increase the effectiveness of it.

“We see a lot of them are moving from just advertising their beach, forest or city to really caring about how visitors and locals interact and making sure that as visitors come, they’re actually contributing positively to the destination as opposed to taking away from it.”

Ailin Fei(Photo provided)

The Travel with Care website offers case studies and spotlights that take visitors around the world from Kyoto to the Dolomites to Hawaii. These resources showcase things that are working well for destinations to improve their tourism outcomes. Fei noted having connections throughout the industry — in addition to being plugged into news outlets and the research in the field — is essential to provide the best information available.

“Travel with Care is an outlet to spotlight different destinations that are doing great things around responsible travel and sustainable tourism,” Fei said. “Being plugged into the industry is really important.”

Messaging is another key component of Travel with Care, Fei noted, to help destination marketing organizations implement impactful changes in their own communities. The goal is to not make tourists feel guilty but to promote positive messages that don’t leave them feeling like a burden.

“When it comes to messaging around sustainability, it’s challenging,” Fei said. “It can be taken in a lot of different paths, and that’s why it’s very interesting to see how different destinations are incorporating it and really implementing it in their destinations.”

Likewise, it’s important for destinations to take into consideration their target audience when choosing how to communicate.

“The language used is easy to follow for people from different backgrounds, especially for international travelers,” Alavipour added.

Traveling better, Boilermaker-style

Roya Alavipour(Photo provided)

The researchers have also recently taken up a new initiative: Boilermakers Travel with Care. This will help Purdue reduce its own tourism footprint and encourage sustainable practices for study abroad and beyond. The team has developed a resource of tips on how to travel more responsibly, which travelers can use to ensure they’re responsible in their travel.

“Our work with Boilermakers Travel with Care is about how do we encourage students, faculty and staff when they’re traveling to be mindful about how they can make positive contributions?” Day said. “We are working with Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future and Study Abroad to share the Travel with Care message to the Purdue Community.  We’ve also shared information with some of the student associations. Although we’re at just the beginning of that process, we really see it as an opportunity to introduce it to Purdue and then to scale that across other universities when we get going.”

Outside of the Boilermakers Travel with Care initiative, Day and Alavipour have recently been working to get undergraduate students involved in contributing to the project.

“I think Purdue’s in a unique position with where the hospitality and tourism management curriculum is around tourism and the courses are around sustainable tourism so that the undergraduate students can slowly learn about that and think about it as they move on to careers in the industry or onward,” Fei said. “I can’t say the same for other universities with that large focus on sustainable tourism. I think we’re in a really good place to be that resource for everyone.”

For Day, having the initiative housed at Purdue makes sense to align with the land-grant mission.

“We’re taking some of the best research that’s available, and we’re applying it to make the world a better place,” Day said.