Effects of protection motivation and travel anxiety on staycation intention: a cross-country examination

Staycation became an alternative tourism form in the history after the global financial crisis in 2008/2009. Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the possible economic downturn after the pandemic, staycation becomes important to individual wellbeing and the tourism industry’s sustainable development in the post-COVID era. In this study, we applied protection motivation theory and stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework to develop and empirically test a theoretical model examining the relationships between protection motivation/travel anxiety and staycation intention in the COVID-19 context. A cross-country survey design was applied to collect data from Australia and China. PLS-SEM analyses revealed that perceived pandemic severity, pandemic response efficacy, and pandemic self-efficacy significantly predicted protection motivation across the two country samples; perceived pandemic severity and perceived pandemic susceptibility positively contributed to travel anxiety. For Australian respondents, travel anxiety predicted staycation intention, whilst for Chinese respondents, protection motivation predicted staycation intention. Post-hoc moderation analysis identified that collectivism (individualism), as a cultural value orientation, moderated the effect of travel anxiety on staycation intention among Australian respondents. This study contributes to the understanding of staycation intention from a protection motivation perspective and enriches the emerging literature on staycation in the field of tourism.