Travel fear and immunity certificates: a two-stakeholder perspective

There is an urgent need in the travel industry to devise strategies that will help navigate the current pandemic as well as provide guidance on how to prepare for the next pandemic. Given health and wellbeing are regarded as important aspects of sustainable development, doing so would build long-term resilience in the travel and tourism industry. This study analyzes the relationships among travel fear, protection motivation, and destination visit intentions in the pandemic context. While previous studies have proposed psychological factors as antecedents of travel fear, this study contributes theoretically to the literature by proposing a conceptual model that allows us to test the way the policy of immunity certificates—which is a non-psychological factor of a risk-reduction strategy—influences travel fear and subsequent decision-making behaviors, where the construct “protection motivation” mediates the travel decision-making process. By adopting customer and investor stakeholder perspectives, this study shows that immunity certificates are effective not only in enhancing travel intentions but also in enhancing the market value of tourism companies. Given that the efficacy of policies is better assessed by multi-stakeholders, the methodological approach taken in the current study can help to better understand the value of COVID-19 measures and immunity certificate policies.