Mental readiness and travel choices in crisis recovery

Although crisis communication and recovery strategies have been studied extensively, the coping mechanisms of consumers during the recovery phase of a product-harm crisis have been insufficiently examined. This paper aims to investigate the role of consumers’ health beliefs and mental readiness during travel in a health-related crisis, which constitutes a subset of product-harm crises. To achieve this, the Beliefs-Mental Readiness-Intention (BMRI) model was developed, and three analyses were conducted to validate this conceptual framework. The SEM established the general psychological mechanism of individuals’ intention to consume travel-related products during the crisis, introducing two newly developed measures: perceived benefits of protection and perceived stigma of consuming products. The second analysis identified a weak moderation effect of diagnosis status in the model. Finally, the theoretical and managerial implications of the research findings were comprehensively discussed.