Travel Confidence Reviving Tourism Industry: Is the Vaccination a Solution?

Abstract

Vaccination can play a decisive role in reducing travel risk and rebuilding travel confidence. Previous studies pointed out that travel desires moderate or influence vaccination intention, while this paper extends their studies to investigate the relationships between vaccine trust (VT), travel confidence after vaccination (TC), travel intention (TI) and travel behaviour (TB). The VT, TC, and TI clusters were insignificant towards travel behaviour, indicating that travel confidence triggers travel intention but did not reflect on behaviour. The binomial logit model disclosed that only travel confidence was statistically significant toward travel intention, whereby tourists who were more desirous of travelling would be 5.3 times greater in the high-TC cluster. This paper suggests that vaccination should not serve as the only solution for the early stage of tourism reboot, as vaccination can boost travel confidence but not the tourists’ behaviour.