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1 Introduction

With the COVID-19 pandemic, risk perception appears as a major discouraging factor of travel. Many research studies acknowledged the influence of health risk perception on travel decision. They also made the difference between the individual risk perception and the social risk perception, two key elements that interact in travel decision. In normal situation, travelers avoid health risk destinations. Those who seek more adventure are often prepared for risk through vaccination or medical disposition before and during their travel.

However, the vacation dreams of millions of tourists have been vanished due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The shock wave created by the spread of the virus has affected the most hedonic motivations. Despite its continuous nature, the tourist machine is paradoxically driven by fear and social phobia. Fear of and anxiety about traveling and contracting the virus create major barriers to travel. They are fed by these fears and also an undermined morale caused by a long period of lockdown, contradictory injunctions from the authorities and the fragile economic situation of households. It is essential to note that the psychological stigma of the quarantines and the period that follows will also have a strong impact on the desire for escape and recreation.

In order to face the virulent virus, lockdown was the sought-after solution. Specifically, travels are strictly prohibited and borders are closed. The interruption of trips has emerged as a disruptive event in the entire tourism value chain. After a catalytic shock, the lifting of travel restrictions must be accompanied by the compliance of new sanitary measures and very restrictive protocols for travelers and providers alike. The absence of zero risk during the trip does not facilitate the decision of tourists and pushes them to be more vigilant. Thus, travel decision requires a considerable effort in terms of documentation (Which destinations are open? And to what extent and under what conditions do they accept travelers? Which means of transport to choose? And does it meet the distancing conditions? Which activities to practice? What risk for me, or for my family? What if I am infected abroad? The risk is concomitant and imminent and its perception appears to be determinant in making a travel decision.

This study is based on a comprehensive literature review on the motivations for tourism and the perception of risk in travel decision. It is commonly accepted that several factors are behind this decision. As such, these factors are basically linked both to the tourist (push factors) and to the destination and to the operators (pull factors). This study emphasizes the elements that control the perception of health risk and their significance in motivations for travel, mainly during the time of COVID-19. By analyzing the results of a field study on a sample of 350 participants, the study shows that COVID-19 and the difficulty of making a decision have attributed to a high degree of risk, despite the protocols aiming at reassuring tourists.

2 Literature Review, Capitalize the First Letter of Every Word in the Title

The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest challenge that tourism has faced for over two centuries. For the first time in history, the sector is shut down. The tourist has never felt more in danger, and has never been forced to give in to his desire to go on a trip. It seems obvious to review important elements of the travel decision largely linked to this context: the risk, the perception of the risk, and the reasons for the trip.

2.1 Travel and Risks

Tourism industry is impacted by a growing feeling of insecurity and instability that has appeared in recent years: A high rate of crime, terrorism (especially after September 11, 2001), food security, natural disasters, and health problems (Table 1) (Dallen (2008), cited in Zélia Breda and Carlos Costa (2006)).

Table 1 Major threats to tourist’s safety and security
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A distinction should be made between crises and disasters. In most cases, crises are unexpected, but potentially predictable, but their effects can be mitigated through effective management. This is not the case with disasters which are unpredictable. Both are major destructive events for tourism (Faulkner, 2001; Prideaux et al., 2003; Breitsohl & Garrod, 2016) and tourists. Indeed,

In times of crisis, for any tourist destination the first concern must be for visitors. Away from home, in unfamiliar surroundings, they are quickly disorientated and very reliant on their hosts and the host communities in general. Adequate planning for what has in the past been seen as the ‘unexpected’ can be the difference between a well-managed problem and a human and economic disaster (Wilks & Moore, 2004).

Tourism is inevitably influenced by society, economy, politics, and nature (Paraskevas et al., 2013; Ritchie et al., 2010) and in particular, by crisis events (Ghaderi et al., 2012). In fact, whatever the origin of the crisis, the decrease in tourism demand has a considerable social and economic impact. Relatedly, this is a key factor in the security of tourism demand and a major concern of all tourism stakeholders (tourists and investors). Concerns about tourism security, whether real or perceived, have been clearly identified as negatively affecting tourism demand (Cavlek, 2002; Zélia Breda & Carlos Costa, 2006), not only in times of crisis but also during the post-crisis period.

During epidemics, World Health Organization (WHO) along with World Tourism Organization (WTO) intervene to advise tourists not to travel to the regions that are affected by the pandemic. The two aforementioned organizations show their worries about the social, economic, and psychological impacts on tourists and local communities. They also work together to bring and share information about the pandemic (Breda, 2004). As a matter of fact, information about the number of cases and deaths as well as the lack of understanding of the virus, how it spreads and its origins, all this aroused serious doubts and imposed severe constraints among the population, leading to an exaggerated perception of the danger (Zélia Breda & Carlos Costa, 2006).

The pandemic was first reported in Wuhan, China on December 31, 2019. The first case of the Coronavirus, similar to SARS and MERS, was reported to WHO on January 30, 2020. WHO, which declared a “public health emergency of international concern,” gave the name of COVID-19 to this new disease. On February 26, 2020, the disease was detected in all the continents of the world. On February 27, the WHO reported, for the first time since its inception, that the number of confirmed cases outside of China exceeded the number of new cases in China (McAleer, 2020). COVID-19 has rapidly become a center of interest and a critical factor in public health management and decision-making as well as a threat to free movement and to tourism in particular. The fear of transmission of the disease has a dramatic impact on tourism activity. In this, traveler’s motivation has become more and more mediated by geopolitical threats, with significant effects on the overall sector of tourism.

During the 1960s and 1970s, consumption was more oriented towards the need for recognition and self-esteem (cf. Maslow’s (1943) pyramid). Air travel was reserved for a privileged class. After the 1970s, the plane became the primary mode of international transport for tourists, making trips to long-haul destinations in demand and popularity thus encouraging mass tourism (Dehoorne, 2013). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, precisely after September 11, 2001, tourism became strongly associated with aliases and unstable events influencing decisions to travel or not, such as October 2002 Bali bombings (club di Kuta), which left 202 people dead; the February Egyptian (Luxor) hot air balloon explosion, which left 19 people dead; kidnappings and rapes of tourists, terrorism, and pandemics. Such events had impacted tourist areas negatively as the latter have been weakened and reduced.

According to Dehoorne (2013), the tourist, in difficult periods full of uncertainties (economic, political, environmental, health …), has developed a rational behavior and has sought safe places, away from the complexities of host countries, in the form of a secure bubble. He gives priority to his safety and security which become basic to Maslow’s (1943) Pyramid. The tourist demand is principally realized for the benefit of the regions and territories that guarantee more safety and security for their host.

In tourism, travelers’ safety has become a priority, although it has been neglected for a long time (Wilks & Oldenburg, 1995). It is defined as the absence of danger, risk, or doubt. The tourist who could imagine that one day he is not concerned because of his tourism temporality, on the contrary, is sometimes the potential target (Dehoorne, 2013). He can be a victim of delinquency (robberies, harassment, etc.), perceived as bargaining chips (kidnapping for ransom), an ideological victim or victim of the spread of a pandemic.

2.2 Travel and Motivation

Motivations are some of the human beings’ needs and wants that they seek to satisfy. Indeed, even if it is a hidden part of the tourist conception of travel, many works within the framework of motivation theory explored this internal, psychological, and dynamic process in human beings, especially tourist’s behavior (Fodness, 1994) which pushes to satisfaction by action in order to restore a certain psychological balance (Crompton, 1979; Dann, 1981; Iso-Ahola, 1982). The concept of motivation was explored by many researchers (Bansal & Eiselt, 2004; Beard & Ragheb, 1982; Fodness, 1994; Fodness & Murray, 1999; and Woodside & Martin, 2008) who tried to explain the relationship between different variables in building travel motivations and intentions by offering complementary reading grids of the personality/personalities of tourists and their motivations, which are as different as they are heterogeneous.

Beard and Ragheb (1983) were the first to suggest a leisure motivation theory based on Maslow’s (1954) theory. They summarized 48 items included in four subscales that they named: intellectual (learning, exploring, creating, or imagining), social (need for interaction, meeting people, friendship, relations, others esteem), competence mastery (achieve, challenge, and compete), and stimulus avoidance (rest and unwind far from the others, avoid contacts, seek calm and solitude, avoid stress and tension of the daily life). Beard and Ragheb (1983) identified as push factors the fact that people do travel and go away from the mundane of their immediate environment for anomie or ego-enhancement factors (Dann, 1977) or for socio-psychological and cultural motives (Crompton, 1979; Fodness, 1994).

Travel motivations depend on several internal and external factors (Chon, 1989; Dann, 1981; Uysal & Hagan, 1993). Travel decision and choice are the result of a calculation of different motivational, psychological, and social factors. Dann (1977) proposed the push and pull factors in travel decisions classified later by Crompton (1979) as internal and external travel motivation forces. Dann (1977) suggested nine factors that Crompton (1979) reduced to seven for push motives (escape from mundane environment, self-evaluation, realization, exploration, prestige, family relations, and social interaction) and pull factors (novelty and education) as the factors to allure the visitors to places of tourism interest. Simply put, both forces explain the significance of the interaction between personal and social conditions to elucidate motivation and travel behavior. Mannell and Iso-Ahola’s (1987) view is relevant in the sense that they showed the gain and reward that tourists seek. In the same vein, Krippendorf (1987a, b) suggested eight travel motivations (recuperation and regeneration, compensation and social integration, escape, communication, freedom and self-determination, self-realization, happiness, and travel broadening the mind).

Therefore, the push and pull motivation theory was largely adopted to explain tourist motivation process (Crompton, 1979; Dann, 1977; Pearce, 1993; Uysal & Jurowski, 1994). On the basis of such theory, those factors interfere to determine fitness for travel (Hudson, 1999). They all contribute to the tourist’s motivations and behavior in his eternal aspiration in order to satisfy different needs as shown by Maslow (1943) and adapted afterwards to tourism by Mill and Morisson (1985).

For Crompton (1979), travel is a kind of escape from the immediate environment and its doom and gloom. Travelers’ escape, according to Iso-Ahola (1982), is engendered by physiological and psychological variables. In this, they are in perpetual process of seeking satisfaction and many psychological rewards by leaving their daily life environment (Iso-Ahola, 1982; Mannell & Iso-Ahola, 1987) and exploring other places and experiences. Pearce’s (1988, 2005, 2011) theory of travel career patterns supports the other authors’ views concerned with travel motivation. The importance of the tourist's career is not denied of interest since it highlights the importance of his cumulative experience in his quest for recreation. The tourist’ career builds his knowledge and choice capacity to avoid destinations that will not give him satisfaction.

Fodness (1994) travel motivation scale, related to the functional models of Katz (1960); Smith et al. (1956), serves as a functional approach in studying tourist motivation. In his approach, Fodness (1994) asserts that travel, as an attitude, is the result of a research process of releasing tension resulting from inner needs. In this, he suggested five functions: the knowledge function, the utilitarian minimization of punishment function, the value-expressive function, the self-esteem function, and the ego-enhancement function. In fact, this conception seems to answer different functions. Basically, tourist’s travel is not only driven by the search for knowledge but also driven by the desire for escape from the stress and painful routine of their environment by looking for fun and joy in recreation. Fodness (1994) tourism motivation theory helps deduct that the choice of a holiday destination is first of all linked to the ability to meet various functions; otherwise, it will be a repulsive destination. That is, the pleasure of travel relates to the conditions of its entire progress from departure to return. It will be unthinkable, except for a few tourists (for example, spiritual explorers), to venture into regions where someone can expose himself to any kind of risk.

The tourist’s personality characteristics determine his travel patterns (Plog, 1987, 2001) meaning that the psychocentric-allocentric model helps segmenting markets and showing different tourist’s scales. However, we cannot ignore the importance of the tourist's global environment, either. By itself, it cats on everyone's conception of risk because of the great influence of culture, beliefs, demographic characteristics (Swarbrooke & Horner, 2007) as well as the mass and social media.

While push factors are internal, pull factors (Crompton, 1979; Dann, 1977, 1981) bring together external elements and destination-related attributes which interact with the push factors to stimulate the departure on vacation. Pull factors include exogenous factors (Klenosky, 2002) like security; while safety can be listed in the internal factors as tourists seek this very element in all the listed factors. That is, tourists seek protection from any physical or mental danger by choosing safe destinations, transportation, and activities.

Witt and Mountinho (1989) divided attractiveness into static (climate, distance, natural, cultural, and historical features…) and dynamic factors (political situation, facilities, hospitality and personal attention, activities…). They introduced a key element in travel motivations: the current decision factors that they summarized in marketing strategies and prices. Similarly, Chritie and Crompton (2001) suggested that price is determinant as a pull factor in travel decision, like security in the destination (Dwyer & Kim, 2003) and the destination image (Shih, 1986).

Richie, Chien and Watoon (2017) focused on the impact of risk perception on travelers’ health and safety. They showed that motivational antecedents play a pivotal role in estimating risk perception. The latter embodies a set of elements such as information and destination image (Riera et. al., 2015), destination trust and online word to mouth (Abubakar & Ilkan, 2016), weather and value-attitude-intention (Jeuring & Peters, 2013), and weather and country image (Zhang et al., 2018).

3 Conceptual Model and Research Methodology

While researchers insist on push and pull factors in travel motivation, safety is less discussed as a factor that limits travel in terms of motivations. As such, safety is an important element in the travel decision-making process. This is often noted for the security situation, whether linked to violence or to sanitary conditions. Tourists choose safer and more risk-free travel options. In this, in the current health situation, both security and safety (physical and sanitary) impact travel motivation to a larger degree.

The tourist’s behavior during the pandemic crisis, like other disease cases, helps conclude that health insecurity and knowledge uncertainty constitute a fundamental cause of travel restrictions. The opposite is also true. Obviously, this is valid for individuals and destinations as well. The significance of safety, especially when compared to other push and pull motivational factors, lies in that it is a condition as well as a limiting force of travel. In this context, health insecurity acts negatively on the tourist’s desire to travel.

Health security has a deep impact on health motivation. This impact in turn is motivated by two major elements. The first is that it decreases the effects of the pandemic on tourists themselves and the second is that health security acts on the tourists’ morale and on the great work deployed by both to regain customer confidence. Put simply, the proposed safety procedures and protocols can be considered as an effective solution to regain the tourists’ confidence, communicating on these measures is even more so.

Therefore, the proposed conceptual model focuses on risk perception and the variables that interact between one another to define it. However, a distinction should be made between the two kinds of variables. First, psychological and cognitive variables include age, gender, family situation, level of education, experience, and the like. Second, social variables are linked to tourist’s environment (state, culture, religion, family, friends, and media) and, in our case, health professionals. As such, these variables determine risk and perception of travel, for example, limiting travel motivation, especially during periods of risk.

Focusing on the perception of risk in general as a factor limiting travel, the current work does not claim to check the variables mentioned above. In order to measure the importance of health risk and its perception among tourists, this study was carried out from 1 April to 30 August with a reasoned sample of 350 participants from a list of three destination management companies based in Morocco. The data was collected through Google Form and then analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) V27. Three hundred and fifty questionnaires were used for data analysis, while 5 of them were discarded as they were incomplete.

The study concentrated on tourists’ motivations and the controlling variables of their travel during the COVID-19 period (2020 summer–autumn and 2021 winter seasons). On the basis of a list of 10 variables linked to the traveler’s environment, tourists were questioned about their perceptions of the new travel conditions. The goal was to estimate equally the importance of the health security variables and the anti-COVID-19 measures as a barrier to travel during the pandemic. The answers measured on 5-point Likert scale aimed to (1) evaluate the perception of the travel experience and service delivery and (2) show that health risk acts as a controlling variable in travel motivation. A Relative Importance Index (RII) was calculated to show the importance of every item.

4 Results

The analysis of the demographic characteristics of the sample highlights the importance of women in the sample (52.86%) compared to men (47.14%). A large propensity of this sample is between 27 and 49 years old (56.29%) compared to other categories. This is due to the choice of the reasoned sample of people who travel a lot and who are generally from Western Europe (27.71% French, 10.29% German and 13.14% Spanish). The analysis also demonstrates that American tourists constitute a significant share (27.14%). Moreover, families form the majority of tourists 55.43%, while 22.86% of the latter involve people who occupy positions of responsibility (22.86%) or work in liberal professions (21.43%) or intermediaries (11.43%). A great majority of them have a minimum level of bachelor's degree which indicates a fairly high level of education. In general, the travelers surveyed made at least one international trip abroad. 41.43% of the participants make two trips per year, while 27.14% of them make three international trips per year. This indicator was crucial in the choice of the sample as it helped clarify travel behavior as well as the perception of international travel.

When asked about their international travel intentions, tourists are dubious. 70% of them did not plan to travel during the summer of 2020, nor in the fall of 2020 (63.14%). They seem unconvinced of the idea of traveling abroad for the next 6 months. The propensity is reversed from winter 2021. 45.71% think of planning a trip in winter 2021 and 80% during spring 2021. This demonstrates that the current situation is not conducive to travel because of the risk of contamination. Improving sanitary conditions is a sine qua non for returning to travel abroad. Indeed, 98% of tourists think they can return to international travel if the virus disappears or if a vaccine is discovered, 42% if the borders are open. The improvement in sanitary conditions seems decisive for the entire sample. The perceived risk is thus higher in the short term, but it is minimized in the medium one.

Moreover, in response to the measures adopted by destinations and the operators, on a list of 10 elements, 82.5% of respondents do not feel reassured, while 10% of them are neutral. The risk perception is higher even with regard to these conditions (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Conceptual model

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In addition, the perception of the travel experience and the delivery of tourist service also seems negative on the basis of the survey results. The overall mean is M = 4.03. The conditions offered by the destinations and the providers do not raise doubts about the danger, although tourists consider these measures important. Therefore, the proposed experience is altered by very severe conditions and does not seem to favor the massive return to travel. Wearing masks, social distancing, limited activities with groups (visits, recreational activities…), hotel protocols; seem insufficient to change health risk perception during travel. Indeed, for the majority of our sample the risk remains higher (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Perception of travel experience and service delivery during COVID-19

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The coronavirus pandemic is the first health challenge that tourism must face in an era of globalization more than ever before. The sector is facing a most serious issue because of the interruption of tourism activity. The health issue comes back to the surface and therefore deserves to be taken into consideration by tourism stakeholders.

Proceed with the results of your paper. You should name the segment as required but without changing its format (Table 2).

Table 2 Sample characteristics
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Start each new paragraph with indent like this. Make sure not to change the type of letters/fonts or the formatting of the paper (Table 3).

Table 3 Perception of travel experience and service delivery during COVID-19
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5 Conclusion

This paper focused on the effects of the pandemic on the tourist’s behavior and concludes to the importance of health considerations for tourism offer and demand. It presented the perception of risk in the international market and demonstrated how tourist motivation was affected by the pandemic. In this, the measures undertaken to revive the activity appear to be ineffective as to dispel tourists’ fears and worries. Facing infection and death, tourists do not seem to be psychologically ready to risk their life. The collective fear and phobia came thus to abort the projects and dreams of travel. Further, a refocusing on the values of safety and health has been witnessed. In the tourism system, the measures designed and taken by governments and stakeholders are essentially meant to prioritize health over other aspects, especially in planning and organizing trips and stays. Interestingly, the tourism value chain along with the tourist service delivery process, are radically transformed to reassure, secure, and carry out any tourist service.

Relatedly, future research may continue to provide more insight into the relationship between health risk perceptions, travel motivations, and service production processes. It may also explore more and more the contexts in which these aspects interact by examining the effects of COVID-19 on the tourism industry and its transformations and innovations induced by the current situation. In this, other aspects deserve special attention regarding how socio-psychological variables act on risk perception tourism as proposed in the conceptual framework.