We would like to invite you to take part in our Treeps study aimed at understanding the holiday-travel behaviour of the people living, working, or studying in Ticino, and particularly in the region of Lugano. Before you decide, we would like you to understand why the research is being done and what it would involve for you. We therefore invite you to carefully read the following document. The researchers involved in this project are also available to answer all your questions if anything is not clear: for any questions, feel free to contact the leader of the SUPSI research group that is in charge of the Treeps study: Francesca Cellina – francesca.cellina@supsi.ch – +41 58 666 6261.

What is the purpose of the study?

The aim of the Treeps study is to support the transition to a low-carbon society, contributing to decarbonization of long-distance leisure trips. Specifically, we investigate the travel behaviour of the people living, working, or studying in Ticino, with a special focus on the region of Lugano. The Treeps research is performed within the broader SWEET Lantern project, funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. 

How and when will the study take place? 

The Treeps research is composed of two parts, Part A and Part B. All participants to the Treeps study will be invited to participate in Part A activities. Only some of the participants to the Treeps study, randomly selected, will instead be invited to participate in Part B activities. Here we briefly introduce both Treeps parts.

Part A: 

Participants will be invited to answer five short online survey questionnaires (answering time about 10 minutes each). The invitations to answer the survey questionnaires will be sent via email to the email address indicated in the Treeps registration form. The invitation will include a customized link, which will allow us to compare the answers you will provide to the different surveys over time. 

The invitations to answer the surveys will be sent every three months, in the following periods:

– soon after the registration to join project activities;

– late June/early July 2025;

– late September/early October 2025;

– late December 2025/early January 2026;

– late March/early April 2026.

Part B:

Some of the Treeps participants, randomly chosen by the SUPSI research team to ensure statistical reliability and validity, will also be invited to participate in Part B activities.

Part B participants will be invited via email to download a smartphone app, developed on purpose for the Treeps project, to install it on their phones, and to register an account on it. Then, they will be invited to freely interact with it, if and when they like it.   

The invitation to participate in Part B activities will be sent at the end of March/start of April 2025. Interactions with the Treeps app will be possible until the end of June/start of July 2025. The precise dates will be communicated via email to Part B participants. 

If you will receive no invitation to join Part B activities, this will simply mean that you will not be part of the random group that will be invited to interact with the app. 

How can I have take part? 

For both Part A and Part B, participants receive detailed information on the characteristics, risks, and benefits of the activities they will be invited to perform, through the following Information Sheet. At the end of such information phases, you will be invited to give your consent to participate, namely respectively to answer the Part A surveys or to install the Part B app and to interact with it. 

You can give your consent to take part in the Treeps study (Part A and Part B) by clicking on the button at the bottom of the  study registration form.

It is up to you to decide whether to answer the Treeps study. If you decide to take part, you are still free to withdraw at any time and without giving a reason. This would not affect your legal rights.

What will happen if I take part? 

You will be invited to join Part A activities, which will require you to fill in five questionnaires. The questionnaires are to be filled in online, via smartphone, tablet or PC, and require a maximum of 10 minutes each to be answered. Questionnaires deal with characteristics of yourself and your household, mostly referring to your behavior for leisure and holiday-making travel, besides  basic information on your socio-demographic characteristics. 

Only if you are part of the randomly selected Part B sub-group of participants, you will be invited to also join Part B activities. For this purpose, you will be invited to download and install the project’s smartphone app, available for both Android and iOS users. The app will provide you with suggestions for leisure trip destinations and will collect information on your leisure trips, inviting you to share experiences on social media, if you will like to do so.    

What are the possible benefits of taking part?

By taking part in Treeps, you will help us to better understand the holiday-making and leisure behaviour of the people of Ticino, and particularly of Lugano, and to later on design solutions to support decarbonisation of holidays-making and leisure time. The insight we will get from your participation to Treeps will help public authorities and private bodies to tangibly support the energy and climate transition.

Besides contributing to community-level impact, through your participation in Treeps you will also gain direct, personal benefits: after each Part A survey, all participants that will have answered all the surveys administered until then and (if invited to join Part B) also downloaded and registered an account on the project’s smartphone app, will enter a random draw offering 10 prizes of 5’000 LVGA (50 CHF) each.  

More specifically, the random draws will take place on April 2025, July 2025, October 2025, January 2026, and April 2026. Overall, they will offer 50 prizes of 5’000 LVGA (50 CHF) each, for a total of 25’000 LVGA (2’500 CHF).

Conditions to redeem LVGA prizes 

The LVGAS are the digital token of the City of Lugano, that can be spent in more than 400 commercial activities: you can find them all at https://my.lugano.ch.

The LVGA prizes will be passed on exclusively to the beneficiaries of the welcome prize and to the winners of the final random draw, that will be personally informed by email soon after the registration or the final Treeps random draw. Prizes and incentives will be paid exclusively as material prizes (LVGAs) and cannot be exchanged or converted into cash money.

Treeps participants will be invited to redeem their LVGA prize within one month from the email communication about the prize. In order to redeem the LVGA prize, Treeps participants will need an active profile and wallet in the MyLugano App. The MyLugano app can be downloaded for free in the Apple and Android stores. The City of Lugano will credit the prize in LVGA to all active users of the MyLugano App. In order to do so, the City will ask about details on the Treeps participants’ MyLugano wallet or email. Treeps participants that do not have an active MyLugano wallet yet, will have up to one month to activate it and communicate it to the city in order to receive the prize/voucher.

What are the possible disadvantages and risks of taking part?

There are no known risks. 

Will my taking part in the study be kept confidential?

At registration on the Treeps registration form you will be asked to provide us, the SUPSI research team performing the Treeps study, with your email address. In the Treeps Part A surveys, you will also be asked to provide us with personal data, such as gender, age group, socio-demographic characteristics (e.g. educational qualification, household size and composition), education level, and household income. If you will be invited to join Part B, we will also collect information on the way you will interact with the Treeps app. 

All the data SUPSI will collect in Part A and Part B is of fundamental importance to ensure the correct organizational management of the Treeps study and the achievement of the established research objectives. We will treat all information concerning you with confidentiality, in accordance with the provisions of the federal (New Federal Act on Data Protection, nFADP) and cantonal legislation on the protection of personal data. 

SUPSI will apply appropriate safeguards to ensure your rights and freedoms are fully implemented. Those safeguards will ensure that technical and organizational measures are in place in order to ensure data security. For example, the survey collected data will be pseudo-anonymized. This means that, the SUPSI research team involved in the analysis of the Treeps data will only have access to data associated by the data processor to a unique and randomly assigned alphanumeric code. They will not have access to either your contact details (your email address) or any personal information that allows your identification. The file containing the personal data and the unique code will be encrypted, made accessible only to the data processor and deleted at the end of the Treeps study. More details are provided in the Data Privacy Policy document.

If I will be invited to join Part B and use the project’s app, will additional conditions apply?

Yes, we would like to make you aware about a few additional conditions regarding use of the Treeps app.

• At their first access on the app (onboarding procedure), users will be requested to agree to terms of use of the app. By completing the onboarding procedure, they will express their consent to interact with it.  
• The app will only be made available to some of the registered participants to the Treeps project, randomly selected. No abusive users will be tolerated. To complete the onboarding procedure, in fact, users will need to enter a personal alphanumeric code (password) that they will receive via email. In any case, should abusive users still be detected, their accounts will be immediately removed from the back-end system.
• The interactions carried out by each user with the project’s app will be recorded and saved on encrypted servers located within the European Union, to which only researchers from the Treeps team at SUPSI, authorised for this purpose, will have access. All the highest standards used in industrial practice to respect the privacy of app users will be applied.
• The app also includes a feature allowing interaction with a ChatBot tool provided by the OpenAI company. If you will be involved in Part B, and will interact with the ChatBot tool available in the app, data about such interactions will also be accessed by the OpenAI company, according to their Terms of use conditions (https://openai.com/policies/eu-terms-of-use) and their Privacy Policy statement (https://openai.com/policies/eu-privacy-policy). Please, be reassured that no email address or personal data of yours will be provided by SUPSI to the OpenAI company.
• The app also includes user-generated content. By interacting with its features, Treeps users will be invited to build posts (pictures coupled with short texts also reporting the estimate of CO₂ emissions to reach the destination shown in the picture), to be possibly published on an Instagram page. In cases where the user has an Instagram account and has indicated it on the project’s app, that account will be tagged in the post published on Instagram.
• Posts published on Instagram will follow Instagram’s terms of use (https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870). By using the “Create post” function offered by the app, users accept Instagram’s terms of use and their privacy policy (https://privacycenter.instagram.com/policy). We assure you that no email addresses or personal data communicated to SUPSI outside of these posts will be provided by SUPSI to Instagram.
• No objectional content will be tolerated. All the user generated contents will be manually verified by members of the Treeps research project (researchers at SUPSI). By means of such a manual check and verification, any objectional contents will be identified and removed from the back-end system. None of such objectional contents will therefore be published on Instagram.  

How will my personal data be used?

The data collected by SUPSI in Part A and Part B will be used in anonymous and aggregate way for reports and scientific publications, so that they cannot be traced back to individuals. SUPSI will not transfer any personal data that may reveal your identity to third parties for purposes other than those of the research project. All information collected by SUPSI will be made anonymous and stored securely for an indefinite period. It will only be available to the research team listed in the “Data Privacy Policy information for research participants” document. 

Who is organizing and funding the research?

The Treeps research activity is organized by the Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI) and is funded by Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) of the Swiss Confederation, within the broader SWEET Lantern project consortium, led by HES-SO.

Other relevant information

This study will be conducted in compliance with the ethical principles established in the “Declaration of Helsinki” and in the “Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine” (Oviedo Convention). The online surveys have also been evaluated by the Ethics Commission of the Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI). 

Contact details

Francesca Cellina, Istituto sostenibilità applicata all’ambiente costruito (ISAAC), SUPSI, via Flora Ruchat-Roncati 15, CH-6850 Mendrisio.
e-mail: francesca.cellina@supsi.ch. Tel.: +41 58 666 6261.