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Travel decreased dramatically during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to return rapidly to prepandemic levels once the degree of fear toward the virus began to diminish among potential travelers. This USA-based 16-month repeated-measure cross-sectional survey study aims to explore the degree to which fear of COVID affected people’s decisions to stay home rather than to travel during the pandemic.

The research used survey data. An extensive data set, composed of over 9,500 respondents, collected through Mechanical Turk over a 16-month time period, was used to compare respondent fear of the pandemic both with their attitudes toward future travel and with Smith Travel Research data reflecting actual pandemic travel patterns.

The results demonstrate how fear of COVID was closely and negatively linked to both travel intentions and travel behavior.

Data were collected from US respondents only.

The findings significantly extend earlier studies and provide guidance for those studying travel consumer behavior regarding trends that should be monitored in the case of a future pandemic or other fear-inducing crisis. For hospitality and tourism managers and marketers, understanding fear as a leading indicator of future travel behavior can result in more timely promotional efforts and staffing and training decisions.

Measuring and understanding consumer fear levels as this relates to travel decisions can help in the future to adjust the message that is sent to the public, perhaps reducing the amount of travel taken during periods when this is unwise and or unsafe.

This paper extends previous work that had been based upon cross-sectional reviews, providing a broader and more valuable study of an important and timely consumer behavior travel topic.

One of the most well-known, seminal models in the tourism field is the one proposed 50 years ago by Stanley C. Plog. His venturesomeness model has been widely cited in journal articles, textbooks, and has also been used as a reference for planning and designing tourism marketing projects. However, empirical research using Plog's psychographics has yielded varied results, some of which have corroborated his model, while others have found partial or no support for some postulates. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to offer an exhaustive review of 47 studies in the literature which have employed Plog's venturesomeness concept to examine travelers' personality traits, attitudes, and behavior, synthetizing empirical findings and drawing conclusions from the cumulative results. A discussion of the model's contribution to the current body of knowledge, managerial implications for tourism practitioners, and directions for future research are presented.

Specifically, this study aims to examine residents’ perceptions regarding the following: the sociocultural, environmental and economic impacts generated by the presence of Airbnb and the irritability caused by the presence of Airbnb based on Doxey’s Doxey (1975) irritation index (i.e. index).

Twenty-one semistructured in-depth interviews were conducted between February and March 2021 with residents of three condominiums in the Huancaro residential complex. Data were analyzed using the qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti 8.

Results showed that participants perceived negative economic impacts regarding investments, jobs, real estate prices and overall cost of living; negative sociocultural impacts regarding criminality, social conflicts and cultural exchange; and negative environmental impacts regarding sanitation in the context of the pandemic and the state of the Airbnb apartments. Further, it was found that participants related to the following three of the four stages of irritability: euphoria, apathy and annoyance.

It is necessary to complement the information with the perceptions of the residents about the city’s authorities and managers in the hotel business before the stage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the current stage.

The study identifies improve Airbnb operations like establishing health paraments and defining cohabitation rules at the condominiums.

The residents consider that visitors’ returns produce positive and negative impacts on the quality of life being important for understanding their perceptions.

Short-term rental companies, such as Airbnb, generate a range of impacts on urban residents, particularly when travelers encroach on areas of the city beyond the traditional “tourist bubbles.” This study explored the perceptions of Airbnb’s impacts on activities among residents of Huancaro, a residential section of Cusco-Peru, in the context of tourism reopening after a year of an almost complete halt in tourism activities because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also highlighted the heterogenetic responses to Airbnb within the community.

Following the changes in consumer behavior in the hospitality industry due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon launched “Explore”, an interactive livestreaming customized service that connects users with hosts worldwide, allowing them to discover a vast array of experiences from the comfort of their homes. This study aims to assess the effects of Explore on the hospitality and tourism industries.

An exploratory qualitative approach was adopted. Data was collected from 18 expert interviews and 292 online reviews on Explore.

The findings indicate that the pandemic has altered consumer behavior when it comes to experience-related venues. Within that shift, Explore was shown to have reinvented the travel industry. The major three themes extracted revolved around the following: replica of real-life touristic experiences (having the experience as if consumers were physically present), experience-bound versus output-oriented customers (those who want to explore the real experience by being physically present versus those who seek to discover a certain culture or acquire a new skill even virtually) and post-virtual experience (effects on the hospitality industry).

The study puts forth the coopetition that could emanate from the inter-relationship between the Amazon Explore platform and the hospitality industry if the two were to cooperate even beyond the context of global pandemics. Indeed, Explore has gained awareness and trial and could be a sustainable ongoing business, especially among those with financial and other types of limitations that could hinder their traveling propensity.