When life gives you lemons, make lemonade: post-COVID marketing strategy to motivate travel by triggering traveler’s inaction regret

ABSTRACT

Considerable research on COVID-19 in tourism and hospitality literature has focused on identifying the negative effects of this crisis and exploring measures to suppress factors that demotivate people from traveling. However, factors that can fuel people’s motivation to travel again remain underexplored. In response to this gap, the present research proposes unique psychology that is related to the current pandemic environment, inaction regret, as a key motivator for people to resume their travel activities. Specifically, this research hypothesizes that two constructs, namely, “anticipated loss of not traveling in the future” and “change in perceived value of travel,” mediate the positive effect of inaction regret on the future intention to travel. Overall, this research extends the existing research on COVID-19 in tourism and hospitality literature by identifying unique emotions pertinent to the current pandemic. At the same time, the findings of this research contribute to deriving post-pandemic marketing strategies to reinvigorate travel demand.

KEYWORDS:

• Commodity theory
• COVID-19
• future travel intention
• inaction regret
• post-pandemic marketing
• prospect theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by New Faculty Grant awarded from University of Houston Division of Research (Research Project I0506459).