Although adventure tourism is divided into two subgroups based on the level of risk, most previous research has not made a distinction in their research. However, due to the high risk, skills, experience, and physical condition required of participants, hard adventure tourism should be studied separately from soft tourism activities. Thus, this study investigates the antecedents influencing hard adventure tourists’ visit intention by adopting the model of goal-directed behavior. Furthermore, two new variables, social media consumption and hardy tourism knowledge, were added to improve the model’s predictive ability. Using 441 Vietnamese hard adventure tourists as research samples, the results have shown the conceptual model to be robust and effective in explaining behavioral intention. Generally, the results were consistent with previous research. However, subjective norms, negative anticipated emotion, and frequency of past behavior produced unexpected results.

The adventure tourism subsector continues to be popular today. Both industry and academia define adventure tourism’s scope from either the physical (e.g., outdoor activity and physical activity) or psychological aspects (e.g., thrill seeking and challenges). Recent studies have pointed out that adventure tourism can be interpreted differently across cultures and markets. Still, risk has always been universally accepted as an essential characteristic of adventure tourism. Thus, most empirical research has studied the role of risk as one of the motivations. However, attempts to investigate related elements that are either a response to or a coping mechanism for the presence of risk are scarce. This present study adopted one of the most prominent frameworks in explaining behavioral intentions, the theory of planned behavior, and included involvement and knowledge variables to extend it. Furthermore, the sensation-seeking and worry constructs were tested for their moderating impact on intentions to participate in adventure tours. The results of structural equation modeling and multigroup invariance tests revealed that subjective norms were not a significant predictor of intentions, while both sensation seeking and worry significantly moderated the relationships between the study variables.

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