New Research Finds That Information on Flight Emissions Changes Booking Behavior
💡 What’s the story?
For the past several years, some flight-booking platforms such as Google Flights and Skyscanner have been displaying estimates of a flight’s carbon dioxide emissions. A new working paper published by Resources for the Future (RFF) finds evidence that when flight emissions are disclosed on booking platforms, consumers place greater weight on emissions when deciding which flights to book.
Using data from the US domestic airline market, the research team found that consumers became roughly 22 percent more responsive to differences in flight emissions after booking platforms began displaying emissions information. Translating this increase in responsiveness into monetary terms, consumers were effectively willing to pay an average of $33 more in the years following the first disclosure to choose an otherwise identical flight that emitted one ton less carbon dioxide, relative to the period before any booking platform displayed emissions information. The average flight in the sample emits 455 kilograms of carbon dioxide, implying that the average consumer was willing to pay about $15 to fully offset the emissions associated with their flight.
While such consumer preferences are not necessarily impactful on their own, a gradual but consistent shift in demand could eventually affect which aircraft configurations, routes, and operational practices are commercially attractive.
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Expert Perspective
“Commercial aviation is a fast-growing source of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other contributors to climate change. Our findings show that emissions disclosure produces a meaningful shift in consumer demand, and disclosure may be a relatively straightforward, in-sector effort that could help improve the economics of emissions reductions for aviation.”
—Nafisa Lohawala, RFF Fellow
🔬 How do we know?
In April 2019, Skyscanner became the first major flight-comparison website to display emissions estimates. Over the following three years, six additional websites, including Expedia and Google Flights, also adopted emissions disclosure. Travelers book through many different flight-comparison platforms, and reliance on these platforms varies across US states. So, when disclosure rolled out, the extent to which travelers encountered emissions estimates varied across both time and geography. If emissions disclosures were effective during the study period, lower-emission itineraries should have gained market share relative to higher-emission itineraries, especially in states where disclosing websites were popular. The team tested this pattern using detailed data on actual flight bookings across US domestic routes from 2018 to 2022. Their analysis encompassed over 1,000 routes between 63 large metro areas and accounted for 74 percent of total passengers traveling between these metro areas.
The team controlled for factors such as fares, routes, airline presence, and aircraft type, isolating the effect of the disclosure information from other factors shaping demand. The results showed that, before any platform displayed emissions, a traveler’s choice between a higher- and lower-emission itinerary on the same route was relatively unresponsive to the emissions gap between flights. As more platforms adopted disclosure, that responsiveness increased—measurably and consistently.
📚 How does this paper add to the literature?
Unlike most existing studies on willingness to pay for emission reductions, which rely on surveys or lab experiments, this paper estimates changes in consumers’ willingness to pay using actual flight booking data.
Much of the existing literature on emissions reductions in the aviation sector focuses on whether consumers are willing to pay for voluntary carbon offsets—payments made to fund emissions reductions elsewhere. This analysis focuses on direct emissions and whether people are willing to pay to book a flight that itself produces fewer emissions.
The authors note that, going forward, flight-booking platforms could update their algorithms to better capture airline decisions that reduce emissions, such as by using sustainable aviation fuels. Algorithm updates and other measures that track emissions reduction efforts could help incentivize airlines to make changes that may otherwise not be economically attractive.
🔎 Where can I learn more?
Read the working paper “Impact of Flight Emissions Information on Consumer Demand: Evidence from the US Airline Industry” by RFF Fellow Nafisa Lohawala and Xuan Teng of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
Read the authors’ related blog post for more information about the findings and the broader policy context.
Resources for the Future (RFF) is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Its mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. RFF is committed to being the most widely trusted source of research insights and policy solutions leading to a healthy environment and a thriving economy.
Unless otherwise stated, the views expressed here are those of the individual authors and may differ from those of other RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals.
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