Fear Or Passion? Predictors Of Travel Behavior And Foreign Travel Intentions In Pandemic Conditions

Over the past two years, the coronavirus pandemic has imposed numerous obstacles to the usual mode of tourist travel. With the abatement of the pandemic, some of the objective restrictions have been removed, but the fear is still present in many people and is known in the literature by terms such as pandemic/COVID travel anxiety/fear/phobia. In this paper, the fundamental research question was to examine the predictors of pandemic travel anxiety and its relationship with the behavior of domestic tourists during the pandemic, as well as with the intentions of future tourist trips. The Theory of Planned Behavior was used as the starting conceptual model. Using the path analysis method, the basic and several alternative models were tested on a sample of 1102 Croatian tourists. The results showed significant main effects, whereby variable models explained 23% of travel behavior during the pandemic, and 20% of foreign travel intentions. As the COVID-19 pandemic is still present, and new global threats have emerged in the meantime (such as war and economic crisis), research on travel anxiety remains a relevant topic for researchers and practitioners in the field of tourism.