Safer tourist destinations: tourists’ perceptions of crime, political unrest and COVID-19 as affecting their travel choices

The goal of this study was to investigate the perceptions of crime on tourists eating out at Florida Road in Durban. According to Visser and Rogerson (2004 cited in Goerge and Booyens 2014: 450), although South Africa has been classified as a relatively safe tourist destination, high levels of crime threaten the country’s tourism growth prospects. Crime Stats Simplified (2014) indicates that Durban central is one of the top ten worst precincts in South Africa with high crime rate at 10.9% after Mitchells Plain and Cape Town Central with 17% and 12.2% respectively. Therefore the study focused at the Florida Road since Durban has been a destination of choice for many visitors (Durban Experience 2015), with the aim of analysing the perceptions of crime on tourists eating out at Florida Road. Safety and security are regarded as pillars for tourism growth and destination competitiveness. The main objectives of this research were; to investigate the perceptions of crime on tourists in Florida Road; to determine whether the stakeholders such as police and businesses are doing anything to tackle the issues of crime against tourists; to investigate the stakeholders’ observation about behaviour of tourists in general in relation to safety and security in the area; to what extent does crime affects restaurant businesses that are serving tourists in the area; to make recommendations to what further can be done to prevent crimes against tourists in Florida Road and the province at large. The triangulation methodology was used by employing both quantitative and qualitative methods through descriptive research approach by means of self- administered questionnaires with 42 hospitality workers, UIP security guards & taxi drivers and 10 law-enforcement agencies and interviews and focus group discussions with 5 key informants respectively. The data collected was processed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences [SPSS] and NVivo software programmes. The results were analysed using descriptive statistics, inferential statistics and a thematic analysis. There is a perception that the number of tourists has decreased in the last three years due to the crime and the area is currently experiencing high level of theft of motor vehicles and theft out of motor vehicles. There was a perception of safety and poor visitor experience due to vagrants who poses as car guards to commit crimes. There is a perception that visitors do not make return visits once they become victims of crime and some businesses do closes down or relocate, it is also perceived that businesses experience financial losses due to crime in the study area.

Generally the study intends to determine the perception of tourists on the issues of safety and security during their visit to Mpumalanga. In particular, the study will firstly aim to ascertain whether visitors to Mpumalanga felt unsafe, and if so, to what extent. Secondly, the study will work towards ascertaining whether the tourists choose to limit their activities because they related to their perceptions of crime and safety in Mpumalanga. Lastly, the study will try to establish whether specific demographic factors of the respondents related to their perceptions of crime and safety in Mpumalanga. The research was quantitative in nature. The data was gathered from approximately 400 tourists in Mpumalanga. These respondents were extracted from a bigger population of tourists that utilised tourist destinations in Mpumalanga. The 400 respondents were randomly selected to complete the questionnaire at the time of their departure. The responses were analysed using the Statistical package of social science (SPSS) statistical analysis computer programme. This software helped to organise the data into tables, charts and graphs and also perform statistical calculations that were pertinent to the data analysis process. The questionnaire was administered on a sample of 400 of which 40% were males and 60% were females. From the whole group, most were between 32 and 42 years of age and 57% of this sample was earning between R5001 and R1000 per month. Most of the respondents were from Africa, with some from South Africa, followed by Europe, America and Asia. A greater number of respondents were actually on holiday with some coming for different purposes like visiting family, friends or doing business. Data shows majority of respondents not encountering any crime related incidences with 19% actually being victims of different types of crime, from xiii harassment to being robbed. Even within these unfortunate incidences, there was some degree of safety for a bigger number of visitors and most felt safe to tour during the day and using public transport while 60% felt unsafe to walk along the streets at night. The perception of safety at night and at place of accommodation varied with age, gender, country of origin and monthly income. Based on the finding from this study the issue of safety and security was a concern to tourists such that it was suggested that: there should be dissemination of information on safety to tourists, development of safety and security policies for tourism, improvement of public transport and participation of police in tourism in order to improve the situation.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether tourists who visited Cape Town in August and September 2001 felt safe while staying in and touring round the ‘Mother City’, and how they perceived safety and security in Cape Town. The findings, which were taken from a survey of 438 visitors to Cape Town, reveal that respondents had reasonably positive perceptions of safety and security, although they felt unsafe going out after dark and using the city's public transport. A number of personal factors, such as nationality and previous experience of crime, were also found to affect respondents' perceptions of crime. These findings are compared with several studies, which include empirical research conducted at other international tourist destinations, the Institute for Security Studies Cape Town Victim Survey, and the South African Tourism data on foreign visitors' perceptions of tourism facilities in the country. In the light of the findings, it is recommended that the tourism industry and law enforcement agencies coordinate efforts to improve crime prevention measures in Cape Town.

Over a decade ago, the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism in South Africa observed that 22 to 25 million potential travellers did not consider South Africa as a destination of choice because of safety concerns. Many authors also point to the crime perception factor as a major contributor to the decline in tourism demand at any tourism destination. Feelings of lack of safety or threat in a specific place can lead to a negative impression of the destination as a whole. This study set out to investigate whether the perception of crime in the Inanda Heritage Route has caused any damage to its overall tourism growth. The Valley of a Thousand Hills was used for comparison purposes. This study strategy used both quantitative and qualitative methods to ensure that the study was reliable and obtained the views of both the tourists and the attractions management regarding the effects of crime perceptions, and on what can be done to minimise the impact. Through convenience and simple random sampling methods, the study involved a quantitative survey of 201 tourists who were visiting the two tourism routes, as well as six managers and four owners of attractions on these routes. The tourists answered questionnaires and the managers and owners were interviewed to produce qualitative data. The findings of the study indicated that crime perceptions play a huge role in deterring tourist activities on attractions. It was also learnt that not all tourists on these routes experienced criminal activities, proving that the issues is possibly more perceptual than actual.

PurposeThe main purpose of the study is to determine international leisure tourist perceptions with regard to crime, to assess the influence of demographic factors and to investigate the influence of prior, during and post-visit measures on international leisure tourists’ crime perceptions.Design/methodology/approachA personal intercept interview survey was used to collect the data at popular Cape Town (CT) tourist attractions via structured questionnaires. A generalized linear model was used to statistically assess respondents’ crime-related perceptions. Qualitative data was also generated via individual in-depth interviews, which were conducted among nine international leisure tourists.FindingsThe study found that international leisure tourists exhibited favorable sentiments regarding crime preparations; general safety information; post-visit crime related perceptions but were less positive about security safety information during their visit. International leisure tourists maintained that crime did not inhibit their activities and was not worse than anticipated during their visit. A majority of tourists indicated that they were not deterred by crime and would revisit CT.Research limitations/implicationsThe research was limited to a single city and to English-speaking international leisure tourists. The study was cross sectional in nature and the number of data collection sites was limited to four of the popular tourist attractions in CT.Practical implicationsThe study showed that a relatively high number of international leisure tourists had either witnessed or experienced crime in CT. Hence, a separate South African Police Service tourism protection unit could be established to help circumvent crime in CT.Originality/valueThe study used both quantitative and qualitative approaches to provide a comprehensive overview of international leisure tourist crime perceptions, which included prior, during and post-visit measures, of one of the top tourist destinations in the world. Additionally, this study is one of the few recent endeavors to assess the influence of a broad range of demographic and crime-related factors on international leisure tourists’ prior, during and post-visit crime perceptions in an African developing country.

Traveling is one of the most popular hobbies nowadays. Natural tourist destinations located in the countryside are a choice for travelers. There are several tourist sites located in the country of Bogor, one of which is in the district of Nanggung. Nanggung sub-district is in the region of west Bogor, approximately 60 km from the capital city of Bogor Regency (Cibinong). The location of the Nanggung sub-district has an area of 135.25 km2, located near the foot of Mount Salak, creating a beautiful atmosphere and quite cold air. There are approximately 30 tourist destinations in the Nanggung sub-district. Base mobile application to help tourists determine the nearest destination. This mobile application helps domestic and foreign tourists select the closest tourist sites visited in Nanggung, Bogor Regency. The haversine method used to calculate the distance is the haversine method. The haversine method estimates the distance. Haversine will calculate the distance between the application user and the location of the surrounding tourist points located in the Nanggung sub-district. This study aims to calculate the length of application users to tourist sites. So that users get convenience in determining the closest location from the application user's position.

Thailand has a wide variety of tourist attractions, making it difficult for tourist to choose where to go on vacation. The tourist destination recommendation system is a challenge for creating a system to help recommend tourist destinations that are appropriate for personal. Therefore, the principal aims of this research encompass two distinct objectives: firstly, to create a recommendation system for tourist destinations in Thailand by applying machine learning algorithms; and secondly, to analyze factors influencing tourists' choices of destinations. The dataset was gathered from an online survey conducted via Google Forms, comprising responses from 429 tourists in Thailand. In the experiments, three different types of feature selection methods were applied in a data preprocessing step. In the modeling process, four machine learning algorithms, namely Decision Tree, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), were used to construct the model and compare the predictive performance of the recommendation system based on hit rate and NDCG. The experimental results showed that suggesting tourist destinations in the Central region was the most effective, with the highest hit rate and NDCG compared to other regions. The average hit rate and NDCG for the five regions were 0.8 and 0.59, respectively. In addition, there has been an analysis of key factors influencing destination selection, such as activity, travel month, travel budget, and the age of tourists, to understand their impact on travel choices in each region of Thailand.

Risk is an inherent factor in the traveler's choice of destination. Tourism destinations differ in many aspects including their location, economic condition, cultural and political status and crime. Given such differences, the analysis of destination risk and its dimensions is of substantial interest. The current study explores the risk factors perceived about Iran as a tourism destination using the mixed methods of qualitative content analysis and exploratory/confirmatory factor analysis. The results of qualitative and quantitative studies indicated that the potential tourists perceive eight types of risk factors about Iran, including the risk of human rights violation, satisfaction, inappropriate dress, inaccessibility to cash, crime, communication, securing visa and social risk.

Many countries, cities and tourist destinations are considered risky or unsafe due to terror attacks, natural disasters, epidemics, crime waves, wars, coups, racial conflicts, social-economic disorders or political unrest. The association of places with danger or bloodshed is a serious obstacle to their attractiveness and is likely to have a negative affect on tourism and investments. The goal of this article is to present three groups of media strategies adopted by places all over the world in order to be perceived as safe: source-focused strategies, message-focused strategies and audience-focused strategies. This paper is based on a variety of qualitative research methods and is the result of careful analysis of dozens of case studies, advertisements, public relations campaigns, press releases, academic articles, news articles, and websites of cities, countries and tourist destinations that were widely considered as unsafe as the result of sudden or ongoing crises.

In many contexts, tourism is a potentially major economic contributor. Promotion is particularly important in international tourism in order to realize its potential and strategic positioning in an effective way. The benefits inherent in the consumption of international tourism services are primarily experiential. Not only does a tourist engage in personal leisure pursuits but also shapes the consumer behaviour of others at the vacation destination (Padgett and Douglas, 1997). Before the actual consumption, the tourist consumer envisions these experiences reasoned upon positive emotions that the destination evokes in his or her mind. Because behaviour is often the result of such perceptions (Lindquist, 1974-1975), the traveller's choice of a given destination depends largely on the favourableness of his or her image of that destination (Goodrich, 1978; Woodside and Lysonski, 1989; Chon, 1991; Baloglu and McCleary, 1999). While manufacturing distributes products to markets, tourism moves markets to destinations (Gunn, 1988). These characteristics of business phenomenon present special challenges and require careful promotional responses. Our study examines the image of Australia as a tourist destination in Malaysia.

PurposeThe study aims to cluster the travellers based on their social media interactions as well as to find the different segments with similar and dissimilar categories according to traveller's choice. The study also aims to understand the behaviour of clusters of the travellers towards destination selection and accordingly make the tour packages in order to improve tourists' satisfaction and gain viable benefits.Design/methodology/approachAgglomerative hierarchical clustering with Ward's minimum variance linkage algorithm and model-based clustering with parameterized finite Gaussian mixture models has been implemented to achieve the respective goals. The dimension reduction (DR) technique was introduced for better visualizing clustering structure obtained from a finite mixture of Gaussian densities.FindingsA total of 980 travellers have been clustered into 8 different interest groups according to their tourism destinations selection across East Asia based on individual social media feedback. For selecting the optimal number of clusters as well as the behaviour of the interested travellers groups, both these proposed methods have shown remarkable similarities. DR technique ensures the reduction in dimensionality with seven directions, of which the first two directions explained 95% of total variability.Practical implicationsTourism organizations focus on marketing efforts to promote the most attractive benefits to the clusters of travellers. By segmenting travellers of East Asia into homogeneous groups, it is feasible to choose a similar area to test different marketing techniques. Finally, it can be identified to which segments, new respondents or potential clients belong; consequently, the tourism organizations can design the tour packages.Originality/valueThe study has uniqueness in two aspects. Firstly, the study empirically revealed tourists' experience and behavioural intention to select tourism destinations and secondly, it finds quantifiable insights into the tourism phenomenon in East Asia, which helps tourism organizations to understand the buying behaviours of tourists' segments. Finally, the application of clustering algorithms to achieve the purpose of this study and the findings are very new in the literature on tourism, to understand the tourist behaviour towards destination selection based on social media reviews.

Understanding how social influences shape tourist destination selection has become increasingly important in the era of digital platforms and networked decision-making.This study develops a comprehensive framework integrating reference group influence, social media interaction, and socio-cultural environment factors, and empirically tests their effects on destination choice using SPSS-based statistical modeling.A structured questionnaire was distributed to tourists, and the collected data were analyzed through descriptive statistics, correlation, and multiple regression techniques.The results demonstrate that (1) reference groups, including family, friends, and tourism communities, exert a direct and significant impact on travel choices; (2) social media platforms amplify information dissemination and user-generated content, strongly guiding destination awareness and preference; and (3) cultural values, social trends, and major events significantly influence destination attractiveness and decision-making.Collectively, these findings confirm that social factors are key drivers of tourism logistics and service demand, with implications for data-driven destination marketing and tourism service management.The study contributes to both theoretical understanding and practical strategies by offering evidence-based insights for tourism enterprises, social media platforms, and destination managers to enhance competitiveness through social-influence-informed decision support systems.

Tourists are now more open in selecting tourist destination. The number of holiday trips were growing rapidly. There were various promotions available to attract tourists to travel either within or outside the country. Travel distance is not an obstacle for tourists to travel, regardless of local and foreign destination. This study will be conducted to identify the motivation of long journey travel that involves push and pull factors. The long journey involves distance, cost and the type of transportation used to get to the destination. For this purpose a comprehensive review and discussion on previous sources which involved a variety of secondary data sources will be used to meet every need of the study objectives. The finding showed that the travel distance was dependent on the motivation for tourists to travel and the type of transport they want to use. Mode of transport used has advantages and disadvantages for long journey travel depending on traveller choice.

The article investigates informal global communication through digital genres, with a specific emphasis on Kazakh language travel blogs. Travel blogs are considered a hybrid type of discourse. This area of research is predominantly studied by Western scholars. Currently, Kazakhstani travel bloggers are actively promoting travel destinations via Instagram accounts, thereby providing practical material in the Kazakh language. The diverse range of language materials available offers rich opportunities for linguistic analysis, underscoring the relevance of this research. The article aims to identify the linguacultural aspects of the most popular communicative strategies and tactics, as well as their linguistic tools, which are effective in engaging readers and influencing their travel choices. To achieve this aim, the following objectives were set: to define the linguistic notion of «travel blogging» and to explore the linguacultural aspects of posts that provide reliable information about tourist destinations. The scientific significance of this article lies in its contribution to the research of travel blog discourse as a branch of hybrid discourse. Practically, the research materials can be used in the development of teaching aids for students and undergraduates in the fields of philology and tourism. Additionally, these materials can aid in the enhancement of lexicographic dictionaries for the tourism industry, and in the creation of marketing and advertising texts, as well as travel guides in the Kazakh language. Keywords: travel blog, post-texts, linguacultural aspect, Kazakh travel content, communicative strategies, communicative tactics.

The tourist intermediary industry has faced multiple challenges to adapt their offers to the heterogeneity of tourists, and understanding consumer interests from a gender and age perspective is considered crucial in the design and marketing of tourist products. The aim of this article is to examine the differences generated by the gender and age variables of consumers of Spanish travel agencies when choosing travel and tourist destinations, focusing on different types of travel, the choice between national and international destinations, and specific destination types. An explanatory quantitative methodology was employed with a hypothetical-deductive approach. A questionnaire was administered to individuals who booked through Spanish travel agencies and a sample of 879 was obtained. The data were analyzed using SPSS 26 software and the main statistical tool was the Pearson Chi-Square (χ2) test. The findings show that gender implies significant differences in travel preferences, with women favoring the exploration of new destinations and men preferring relaxation travel. Age groups impact the choice between national and international travel, but have a lesser effect on specific destination preferences. This research underscores the importance of considering gender and age in understanding consumer behavior within the travel sector, with the aim of developing more effective marketing strategies and catering to diverse customer needs. Within the implications, the growing importance of the older traveler segment should be highlighted, which requires future research and comparisons with the younger traveler segment.