The influence of tourist risk perceptions on travel intention to mega sporting event destinations with different levels of risk

Abstract

While hosting mega sporting events brings various benefits to the host regions from the increased number of tourists, one of the main factors that deters tourists is the various types of risks associated with international travels. The sport tourism literature has highlighted terrorism risk and political instability as major concerns that impact travel intentions. This study examined and compared the influence of tourists’ risk perceptions on travel intentions across mega sporting event host destinations with different levels (i.e. apparent risks, less imminent risks, and unidentified risks) of such risks. Data were collected from 571 potential tourists via an online survey software and analyzed using a structural equation modeling technique. The results indicated that perceived terrorism risk significantly influenced the tourists’ travel intentions. Tourists’ terrorism risk perceptions toward South Korea (apparent risks) most significantly impacted their travel intentions, followed by general destinations outside of the United States (unidentified risks), while political instability was not significantly related to travel intentions. These findings offer practical implications for mega sporting event organizers.

Post COVID-19 Pandemic International Travel: Does Risk Perception and Stress-Level Affect Future Travel Intention?

“…Qi et al (2009) described the risk as an important factor when considering that international tourism supports this idea. Several studies have also observed the influence of risk perceptions of tourists on their travel intentions (Desivilya et al, 2015;Reisinger & Mavondo, 2005;Teitler-Regev et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2019). The relevant studies verified that risk perception is essential to travel decisionmaking.…”

Post-COVID-19 crisis travel behaviour: towards mitigating the effects of perceived risk

“…Generally, prior contemporary studies have also shown that perceived risk is detrimental to the travel intensions of tourists (Kim et al , 2019; Novellia et al , 2018; Olya and Al-ansi, 2018), including in the cases of risk associated with major tourist destinations which have been susceptible global shocks associated with health crises. Previous studies have generally alluded to the negative impact of both epidemics and pandemics on international tourism in the cases of China (McLaughlin, 2020; Qi et al , 2009), Thailand (Rittichainuwat and Chakraborty, 2009; Tavitiyaman and Qu, 2013), the Gambia (Novellia et al , 2018), Japan (Cooper, 2005) and Hong Kong (Law, 2006).…”

“…While, in the case of Ghana, Adam (2015) determined that environmental, political, financial, socio-psychological, physical and expectation risks were associated with travel and tourism to the country. Similarly, multiple risk dimensions, including personal safety, cultural, socio-psychological and violence risks, were associated with travel to China for the 2008 Olympic Games (Kim et al , 2019). As a result, what is evident from the extent of the literature is that perceived risk is a multi-dimensional and idiosyncratic construct (Carballo et al , 2017; Liu et al , 2016; Wolff et al , 2019).…”

Incidence of Covid-19 in the behaviour of tourists of the Coquimbo region

“…This situation denotes that to the extent that people perceive that the risk of traveling is low, the intention to travel will increase (Hajibaba et al, 2015). Therefore, even when there are incident sociodemographic variables, the role of perceived risk is the determining variable for the traveler, as has recently been exposed by other authors (Karl & Schmude, 2017;Kim et al, 2021).…”