The factors affecting Vietnamese people’s sustainable tourism intention: an empirical study with extended the theory of planned behavior (TPB)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors affecting Vietnamese people’s sustainable tourism intention (IN) with extended the theory of planned behavior (TPB). Design/methodology/approach Preliminary quantitative research was carried out before large-scale formal quantitative research with a sample size of 628 Vietnamese people. Using the partial least squares structural equation modeling method with the SmartPLS tool, measurement and structural models 3.0 were evaluated before testing the research hypotheses about the influence of factors on the IN of sustainable tourism. Findings This study uses the extended TPB model with original constructs and two additional constructs, travel motivation (TM) and moral reflectiveness (MR), to find out the factors affecting the sustainable tourism IN of Vietnamese people. All hypotheses are accepted, except for the hypothesis about the relationship between TM and attitude toward sustainable tourism. MR has been shown to have a more positive and stronger (insignificant) effect than other factors of the proposed research model on sustainable tourism IN. Thereby, this study contributes both theoretically and practically to policymakers, researchers and tourism enterprises in promoting sustainable tourism IN. Research limitations/implications The main limitation of this paper is the deliberate sampling method and targeting the demographic proportion corresponding to the population has lost the randomness of the survey sample. Practical implications The findings indicate that state management agencies and tourism enterprises in Vietnam need to pay attention to communication to raise awareness of environmentally oriented tourism and promote the ability to participate in sustainable tourism at a reasonable price as well as the opportunity for easy access and, at the same time, take measures to influence TM and have communication strategies that address the ethical value of participating in sustainable tourism. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first empirical study to contribute to the existing literature on tourism by integrating TPB constructs with TM and MR to predict sustainable tourism IN.