The travel between home and destination is a key element of any holiday and has received increasing attention by tourism scholars as its environmental and particularly its climatic impacts have become widely recognized (Gössling 2002; Metz, Davidson et al. 2007). As part of the discussion on how to mitigate the negative impacts of holiday travel, the role of the consumer has been highlighted and consumers’ travel mode choices have been identified as a key area of research and policy making (Scott and Becken 2010).

Market-based policy interventions have been considered the most realistic opportunity to encourage behavior change, as they are neither based on the consumers’ goodwill like voluntary action nor difficult to introduce and manage like regulations limiting the amount of CO2 emitted per person (Hardin 1968; Becken 2007). Several countries have introduced measures aiming to particularly address the increasing popularity of air travel. These measures adopt “the polluter pays principle”, increasing prices for selected travel modes through e.g. taxes and emission charges. Relying on extrinsic motivation these measures ignore psychological factors like environmental attitudes as behavior antecedents (Frey 1999) assuming an attitude-behavior or value-action gap. Such a gap has been suggested by a number of studies (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002; Randles and Mander 2009) particularly in cases where the behavior involves financial costs or entails inconvenience due to e.g. unfavorable external conditions (Guagnano, Stern et al. 1995; Diekmann and Preisendörfer 2003; Thøgersen and Crompton 2009).