Effects of protection motivation and travel anxiety on staycation intention: a cross-country examination

ABSTRACTABSTRACTStaycation became an alternative tourism form in the history after the global financial crisis in 2008/2009. Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the possible economic downturn after the pandemic, staycation becomes important to individual wellbeing and the tourism industry’s sustainable development in the post-COVID era. In this study, we applied protection motivation theory and stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework to develop and empirically test a theoretical model examining the relationships between protection motivation/travel anxiety and staycation intention in the COVID-19 context. A cross-country survey design was applied to collect data from Australia and China. PLS-SEM analyses revealed that perceived pandemic severity, pandemic response efficacy, and pandemic self-efficacy significantly predicted protection motivation across the two country samples; perceived pandemic severity and perceived pandemic susceptibility positively contributed to travel anxiety. For Australian respondents, travel anxiety predicted staycation intention, whilst for Chinese respondents, protection motivation predicted staycation intention. Post-hoc moderation analysis identified that collectivism (individualism), as a cultural value orientation, moderated the effect of travel anxiety on staycation intention among Australian respondents. This study contributes to the understanding of staycation intention from a protection motivation perspective and enriches the emerging literature on staycation in the field of tourism.KEYWORDS: StaycationCOVID-19protection motivationtravel anxietyAustraliaChina AcknowledgementsThis project was supported by the SBL Centre for Tourism Research at Edith Cowan University in Australia and Zhangle Technology Co. Ltd. in China.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis research project has been approved by the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee (Approval number: 2022-03514-WANG).