Time–Money Segment Differences in Ideation and Collaboration Readiness in Sustainable Tourism Education

This study examines whether tourism students’ self-reported time–money use patterns are related to their readiness to collaborate on idea development, and whether sustainability emerges spontaneously in their tourism innovation ideas. Using an anonymised dataset of open-ended questionnaire responses from Slovenian higher education tourism students (N = 597; 2019–2025), we applied deterministic rule-based coding to classify the presence of actionable ideas and sustainability framing, as well as collaboration readiness and conditions. Actionable ideas were common (53.4%), but sustainability framing was uncommon (7.5%). Most respondents were unconditionally willing to collaborate (69.3%), while 30.7% expressed conditional willingness or unwillingness. Time–money behavioural segments were significantly associated with collaboration reservations, whereas segment differences in ideation and sustainability framing were not significant. Among students expressing reservations, topic match and perceived team quality were the most frequently stated conditions. These findings indicate that sustainability-oriented tourism education should support both sustainability integration and low-risk collaboration through clear project briefs, topic-based matching, and team-process supports. The conclusions should be interpreted with reasonable caution as they are context-specific evidence based on self-reported, rule-coded responses, particularly for sustainability framing, where positive cases were rare. In this context, segmentation should be regarded as a diagnostic tool for course design rather than as a basis for labelling students.