Travel Motivations, Expectations and Intention to Travel Post COVID-19

Abstract

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The 2019 corona virus disease (COVID-19) is a human tragedy and has a growing impact on the societies, economies, and the businesses around the world. In addition to the various types of the impacts, this outbreak has also led to the feelings of fear and anxiety related to health systems. Pandemic response resulted in to limiting to the non-essential activities including travel unless absolutely urgency involved. Though individual differences in emotional and personality-based variables vary yet, the perception of risk associated with the travel is going to have significant impact on travel behaviour of the tourists. Thus, the associated demand and the future scope of the tourism industry needs research investigation on the behavioural pattern of the tourists as a input variable for resilient strategy. With this backdrop, the present study aims to investigate the tourists’ expectations, motivations and intentions to travel post COVID19 outbreak. COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the economy of the world, hitting tourism industry the hardest and disrupting both travel supply and demand. As the consequence of such global adversity, tourists fear and no more wish to travel, especially to the suspected places (Nicholl, 2006). Followed by lockdown of most of the nations impacted by COVID-19 travel restrictions have eased around the world and people are hoping to slowly inch back to their normal lives (Raavya Bhattacharyya,2020). But if they are ready to travel or not still remains a question. Fliggy, Alibaba’s online travel platform surveyed a group of people in China to understand their travel expectations and the results show that 59% wanted to travel in 2020 and 14% in 2021. Yet those who want to travel would have some expectations and possess some or other kind of motivations to travel. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to draw upon an expectation, motivation, and intentions (EMI) model in lieu of these variables post COVID-19 situation. The partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique has been employed to process and analyze the data. The study has investigated the effect of individual factors on travel intention as in EMI model.

Keywords: Travel Motivations, Tourists expectations, intention to travel, COVID-19

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