Reschedule Your Travel Plans: Human Health and Air Pollution

Abstract

Air pollution is one of the biggest challenges for human health, and this is especially true for PM2.5 pollution in developing countries like China. Much of the PM2.5 research has been conducted in urban areas, but most tourist attractions are outdoors and outside cities and have been left out of related studies, leaving tourists unaware of the deadly air. To fill this gap, we investigated monthly PM2.5 concentrations in all of China’s outdoor tourist attractions. Our results indicated that summer is the healthiest time to travel in the Northeast, South, Southwest, and Northwest of China. Without air pollution management, our results also indicated that more than one third of the outdoor attractions would become unhealthy throughout the year. Thus, our work provides medical information to suggest that all tourists schedule China travel during periods of healthy air quality and also calls for instant air pollution management in China and beyond.

Using social distancing technology in hotels: a social exchange perspective

“…There are many conceptualizations of health-related risks, predominantly in the early tourism literature (Roehl and Fesenmaier, 1992), as consumers perceive traveling to certain destinations to be risky to one's health (Sun et al, 2019). While consumers' health risks associated with pandemic concerns among hotel guests has been investigated (Zemke et al, 2015), the hotel literature only recently began to examine health risk related to COVID-19.…”