The Age of Tomorrow: Exploring Risk-Taking Styles in Travel Across Generations

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has impacted the tourism industry at the global level for years. The UNWTO (2020) reported that COVID-19 led to a fall of 180 million fewer international tourist arrivals and a US $195 billion loss in export revenues from international tourism between January and April 2020. In 2022, UNWTO (2022) revealed that international tourism remains far below pre-pandemic levels. The reason is that health risks are likely to remain in many travellers’ minds, leading to a persistent unwillingness to travel (Duro et al., 2021). Indeed, scholars in the tourism discipline agree that tourism decision-making in risky contexts remains important research (Kim et al., 2022; Sigala, 2020). For instance, Matiza (2020) highlighted that travellers’ behaviour associated with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis is an urgent discourse within contemporary tourism research. Along these lines, an in-depth understanding of travellers’ risk perceptions and risk-taking behaviour is essential for the tourism industry to adjust its market strategies to recover the tourism economy in the post-COVID-19 era.