Profiling Tourists’ Fear, Resilience, and Protective Behaviors toward Post-Pandemic Travel

To overcome the long shadow of COVID-19 on tourism, it is particularly important to understand tourist psyche and behaviors toward post-pandemic travel. By integrating protection motivation theory and resilience theory, this paper aims contribute to literature by identifying distinct post-pandemic tourist segments based on their psychological, behavioral, and sociodemographic attributes. Via an online survey, the study collected 1208 questionnaires across most provinces in mainland China. Results reveal four segments toward post-pandemic travelling, including fearful, high resilient, inactive coping, and threat careless tourists, providing valuable information to understand different tourists’ psychology toward post-COVID-19 travel. Tailor-in strategies are identified to eliminate negative consequences generated during the COVID-19 outbreak