Risk Perceptions and Pleasure Travel: An Exploratory Analysis

Abstract

This article investigates risk perceptions associated with pleasure travel. Psychophy sical scaling methods and multivariate analysis identified three basic dimensions of perceived risk: physical-equipment risk, vacation risk, and destination risk. Subsequent cluster analysis of the respondents based on the three risk dimensions identified three groups of travelers with substantially different risk perceptions regarding travel. The three risk groups differed in terms of the most recent trip taken and the benefits soughtfrom travel as well as basic demographic characteristics. Interestingly, relationships between risk perceptions and travel behavior appear to be situation-specific, suggesting that it may be difficult to generalize behaviors observed in the purchase of goods to travel decision making.

Tourism at Risk: A Review of Risk and Perceived Risk in Tourism

“…Review of some tourism literature shows that financial, psychological, satisfaction, and time risks are relevant to pleasure travel (Roehl & Fesenmaier, 1992;Sönmez & Graefe, 1998a) whereas for other scholars, functional, physical, financial, social, and psychological risks are tourism-related (Björk & Kauppinen-Räisänen, 2013;Quintal et al, 2010). All the aforementioned risks are borrowed from the consumer behaviour literature.…”

“…All the aforementioned risks are borrowed from the consumer behaviour literature. It might be too early to conclude, but physical risk was not widely mentioned in tourism literature before the 9/11 incident (except Tsaur et al, 1997) − at least not in the classic works of Roehl and Fesenmaier (1992) and Sönmez and Graefe (1998a) which are two of the most cited articles in the discussion of tourism safety and security.…”

“…Plog (1974); 2. Roehl & Fesenmaier (1992) A large proportion of the selected literature studied the impacts of risk perception on travel intention and behaviour. Many of these studies were found to be overlapping with studies on risk factors.…”

“…Tsaur et al (1997) is one of the first tourism studies to evaluate risks empirically using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method. Other studies focused on the scaling of travel risks using psychometric analysis (Roehl & Fesenmaier, 1992) and Smallest Space Elaine CL Yang & Vikneswaran Nair Analysis (SSA) (Gray & Wilson, 2009). There are also studies which measured risk of a specific destination, for instance, Israel (Fuchs & Reichel, 2006) and Thailand (Wichasin & Doungphummes, 2012).…”

“…For instance, Pennington-Gray and Schroeder (2013) studied the influence of Facebook and other social networks on tourist risk perception. The values of research on information encompass two aspects: (1) risk perception is built upon the available information that tourists are exposed to (Pennington- Gray & Schroeder, 2013;Shin, 2005); (2) information search is one of the risk-reducing activities (Reisinger & Mavondo, 2005;Roehl & Fesenmaier, 1992;Tsaur et al, 1997). Sources of information are not limited to external media, for instance, media, travel advisory, and word-of-mouth.…”