Awareness and Air Travel Behavior of Thai Passengers for Global Warming Alleviation in the Airline Industry

Abstract

The objectives of this research were: 1) to survey the opinion of Thai passengers on the impact of global warming and global warming alleviation on air travel, 2) to study awareness of Thai passengers toward global warming, and 3) to study behavior of Thai passengers on air travel behavior for global warming alleviation. The research population was 38,299,757 Thai passengers who used Don Mueang International Airport. The sample for quantitative data collection was 400 Thai passengers and for quantitative data collection was 27 Thai passengers selected by purposive sampling technique. The data collection tools were the questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative data analysis used frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, t-test, One-Way-ANOVA, and Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient. Content Analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data. The results revealed that: 1) impact of global warming causes more hot weather, climate variability, season change, disaster, and natural disasters. For
the global warming alleviation which passengers had a positive opinion that they can help reduce global warming and the impact on environment from air travel, 2) awareness on global warming of Thai passengers was at good level ( = 4.51, S.D. = 0.43), and 3) Thai passengers had behavior in air travel to reduce global warming on a moderate level ( = 3.50, S.D. = 0.78). Furthermore, airlines and related agencies need to accelerate passengers’ knowledge on global warming alleviation in the airline industry, raise their awareness of global warming, and encourage passengers to change their travel behavior in a positive way. Keywords : awareness, behavior, air travel, global warming