New Empirical Evidence: Consumer Support for Environmental Restoration Projects

How to read this study. This was a stated-choice experiment: participants made their decisions in a simulated booking with no money at stake. It measures appetite and platform preference, not deployment behavior. Our subsequent airline studies put real money on the line; this study is the reason we ran them.

Why we ran this study

Most travelers say they care about the environment, yet very few take action at the moments where it would count. The booking checkout is one of those moments: a high-intent, high-spend decision point where a small, well-designed ask could turn stated concern into contributions. We wanted to know whether people would choose a reforestation contribution when offered the chance during a flight purchase, and whether being asked changed how they felt about the platform doing the asking.

How we tested it

Participants (n = 36) completed a realistic flight-booking flow on a simulated online travel agency. At checkout, they were offered an easy, one-tap option to add a reforestation contribution to their purchase, framed as 10% of the ticket price and going to Rainforest Trust. The choice was hypothetical: no participant paid for a ticket or a contribution, so the decision cost them nothing. Participants who declined saw a short confirmation prompt before their choice was final. We then measured who opted in, how the contribution option affected preference between platforms with and without it, and participants' stated likelihood of booking again.

Key findings

• 69% of participants chose to add the contribution (64% at the first ask; the remainder accepted after the confirmation prompt).
• 75% preferred the online travel agency that offered an easy-to-use contribution feature at checkout, including participants who chose not to donate.
• A significant number of participants said they would be more likely to book on a platform offering an easy way to contribute, even at higher ticket prices.
• Stated perceptions of the platform and likelihood of future use were not negatively affected by the presence of the donation option.

Asking customers to give at checkout doesn't cost goodwill. It builds it, even among those who decline.

What a stated choice does and doesn't tell you

Because nothing was at stake, the 69% is a ceiling on appetite, not a forecast of behavior. Two numbers should be kept apart:

• 69% is stated intent in this hypothetical study: what people choose when choosing costs nothing.
• ~5% is the conservative opt-in rate we'd plan around in a live checkout. This is a deployment expectation for a different quantity (real customers, real money, no experimenter in the room), not a revision of the study result.

Even at that conservative rate, checkout contributions generate meaningful conservation funding at the scale of online travel booking, and our airline studies, where participants gave up real bonus earnings, confirm that a well-designed ask moves actual giving, at rates between those two numbers.

What this is not

A checkout donation is not a carbon offset. A few dollars toward reforestation does not cancel a flight's emissions, and we don't claim it does. The flight's footprint belongs to the airline's operations, not its checkout screen. What we study is narrower and still worth studying: whether a better-designed prompt moves more people to fund conservation voluntarily, and whether being asked well changes how they regard the brand that asked.

What this means for implementation

Reforestation contributions can be implemented quickly and at negligible cost:

• Integration requires only a basic change to the checkout and payment workflow. No new infrastructure is needed.
• Rainforest Trust is already equipped to accept contributions from partner platforms.

Methods and provenance

36 participants completed a simulated OTA booking online. Each rated both a checkout with the contribution option and one without, then chose between the two agencies. The primary outcomes were the opt-in decision (with a confirmation prompt for decliners), platform preference, and stated booking intent on 7-point scales. All decisions were hypothetical; no money changed hands. The study was not preregistered. The full dataset is public on the Open Science Framework: osf.io/8yk2a. Key limitations: the small sample, the hypothetical stakes, and the social desirability pressure of being asked twice all push the observed rate upward, which is why we treat 69% as appetite and test behavior with real money elsewhere.

Related work

This study established that travelers say they will give at checkout. Our subsequent airline experiments asked how the design of that ask changes what people actually do with real money. Across three booking flows, imagery, suggested amounts, and concrete impact statements materially moved both participation and amount. See Redesigning the In-Booking Donation Flow.

Open data

The full dataset and materials are available on the Open Science Framework: osf.io/8yk2a.