Investigating Tourists' Travel Intentions: A South Asian Perspective from Pakistan
The present paper is designed to analyze the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the travel intention of tourists. In this study, three factors have been incorporated to have an in-depth analysis regarding tourists' travel intention in the pandemic. The three factors are traveling restrictions, travel constraints, and fear of Covid-19. The collected data was analyzed by using PLS-SEM. The findings indicated that traveling restrictions during the pandemic has a positive and significant impact on anxiety. In contrast, traveling restrictions are negatively and significantly linked with travel motivation. Additionally, travel constraints are further classified into three categories, i.e., interpersonal, intrapersonal, and structural constraints. The results depict that all constraints have a positive but insignificant association with anxiety and travel motivation. However, intrapersonal is positively and significantly linked with anxiety, and structural constraint is negatively and insignificantly associated with anxiety. It is observed that fear of Covid-19 increases anxiety among people, but it does not play a significant role. On the other hand, fear of Covid-19 has a negative and significant impact on travel motivation. It shows that fear of Covid-19 decreases travel motivation. Lastly, travel motivation is negatively and significantly associated with travel intention, but anxiety has a positive and significant impact on travel intention. The findings of this study can help government and tourism-related authorities better understand the tourists' travel intention in the wake of Covid-19.