Flight-free: What Swedish views on travel might tell us about the future

Dec 13, 2021

In Sweden, 80% of national flight emissions are caused by leisure and holiday travel. Image: Unsplash/ Jon Flobrant

Sara Ullström

PhD Candidate in Sustainability Science, Lund University

Kimberly Nicholas

Associate Professor of Sustainability Science, Lund University

Our Impact

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Travel and Tourism is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Travel and Tourism

Our media analysis identified five themes of holiday air travel: the purpose of vacation, ideas of the good life, time, mobility, and climate change. These themes were represented differently over time, indicating three phases of views on air travel.

Media analysis identified five themes of holiday air travel: the purpose of vacation, ideas of the good life, time, mobility, and climate change. Image: Lund University

Have you read?

Representations of holidays used to evoke aspirational luxury (left) and air travel as a way to make time to relax (centre), but there has been a shift to more coverage of slower travel that doesn’t include flying overseas (right). Image credits (from left to right): SAS/The SAS Museum Oslo airport Norway, 1950s; TUI Sverige, 2019; Vagabond travel magazine, 2018. Image: SAS/The SAS Museum Oslo airport Norway, 1950s; TUI Sverige, 2019; Vagabond travel magazine, 2018.

Discover

What is the World Economic Forum doing to reduce aviation's carbon footprint?

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.