How to Influence Rural Tourism Intention by Risk Knowledge during COVID-19 Containment in China: Mediating Role of Risk Perception and Attitude

Abstract

With both cost and safety taken into account in the context of the life-threatening COVID-19 pandemic globally, rural tourism is expected to be the top choice for Chinese residents for relaxation and enhancing parent-child relationships. In this paper, a structural equation (SEM) model was proposed to compare risk knowledge, risk perception, risk aversion attitudes and behavioral intentions towards rural tourism. According to the empirical results, there was a large proportion of tourists showing preference for rural tourism recently. Potential participants in rural tourism paid most attention to the performance realization and time cost of scenic spots, while the psycho-social risk posed by COVID-19 had little impact. The inherent risk nature of risk aversion attitudes made knowledge of the pneumonia risk less effective in reducing tourists’ intentions, while knowledge of the pneumonia risk was more effective in alleviating the risk perception that potential tourists have towards rural tourism. With regard to travel intention and recommendation intention of rural tourism, the negative impacts of risk aversion attitude were more considerable compared to risk perception. Meanwhile, the parallel mediating effect of risk perception and risk aversion attitude in rural tourism needed to be taken into consideration together.

Travel Anxiety, Risk Attitude and Travel Intentions towards “Travel Bubble” Destinations in Hong Kong: Effect of the Fear of COVID-19

“…When anxiety and risk attitude decrease, travel intention increases. The results support the findings of previous studies [ 45 , 46 , 49 , 57 ]. This study introduced travel anxiety and risk attitude as mediating variables between fear of COVID-19 and travel intention.…”

“…Three items measure Risk Attitude , and these items were adopted from Zhu and Deng [ 46 ]. A sample item is “I will not eat with local friends and relatives after their trip to a travel bubble destination”.…”

“…Three items measure Travel Intention , and these items were adopted from Reisinger and Mavondo [ 49 ] and Zhu and Deng [ 46 ]. A sample item is “I prefer to travel to ‘travel bubble’ destinations over other forms of tourism”.…”

“…This perception will result in a corresponding decision. Under such circumstances, people will tend to choose less risky destinations [ 45 , 46 ].…”

COVID-19 Pandemic and Tourism: The Impact of Health Risk Perception and Intolerance of Uncertainty on Travel Intentions

“…Despite little discordance in the academic literature, tourism risk perception is usually considered as a potential loss that arises from the uncertainty of the tourism activities results (Roehl & Fesenmaier, 1992;Sönmez & Graefe, 1998). It is related to a number of consequences in costumer behavior, like purchase intention (Liu et al, 2013;Mohseni et al, 2016), re(visit) intention (Rittichainuwat & Chakraborty, 2009;Chew & Jahari, 2014;Zhu & Deng, 2020), satisfaction (Quintal & Polczynski, 2010;Xie et al, 2020), loyalty (Casidy & Wymer, 2016;Chahal & Devi, 2017) etc.…”