Senior's travel constraint, negotiation strategy and travel intention: Examining the role of social support

Abstract This paper explores how travel constraints influence seniors' travel decision. By including social support for travel as a moderator in the hierarchical constraint model, we examined the effects of travel constraints, social support, and negotiation strategies on seniors' travel intentions. Face‐to‐face questionnaire interviews were conducted with Chinese seniors. The results were in accordance with the hierarchical constraint model in general, but also revealed some interesting findings: (a) for Chinese seniors, intrapersonal constraint (health constraint, habit constraint) and interpersonal constraint played a vital role in influencing travel intentions; (b) the negative effect of structural constraint was negotiable, but the negative impacts of intrapersonal and interpersonal constraints were hard to negotiate; (c) the effects of sub‐constraints at the same level were heterogeneous, for example, the effects of cost constraint were insignificant, while those of time and transportation constraints were significant; (d) social support for travel had a negative moderating role on the relationship between habit constraint and negotiation but a positive moderating role on the relationship between interpersonal constraint and negotiation. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.