Returning to Travel: Fear, Coping, and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the tourism industry, resulting in consequences such as travel fear and a decline in travel and tourism. Recognizing the needs of study in pandemic travel, this study explored individuals’ pandemic travel decision-making mechanism by investigating relationships between pandemic travel fear, coping strategies, resilience against travel fear, and pandemic travel intentions. Further, this study investigated the moderating role of risk tolerance in those relationships. The findings of this study suggest that people responded to pandemic travel fear by engaging in different types of coping strategies (e.g., task-oriented, emotion-oriented, and avoidance oriented), and through the coping strategies, resilience against travel fear was built which positively influenced individuals’ travel intentions during the pandemic. Moreover, this study found significant differences in those relationships across high and low risk tolerance groups except for the relationship between resilience against travel fear and pandemic travel intentions. This study deepens our understanding of the pandemic travel decision-making process providing recommendations on how the tourism industry might encourage tourists to travel during the COVID-19 pandemic.