Relieving tourist anxiety during the COVID-19 epidemic: a dual perspective of the government and the tourist destination

ABSTRACT

The high infectivity and uncertainty of COVID-19 could intensify the tourists’ psychological anxiety, and further greatly hinder the tourist flow and tourism recovery. Finding ways to ease tourist anxiety and renew their travel confidence is a critical issue that has remained unsolved during COVID-19. The government and tourist destination, providing and guaranteeing tourism activities, are helpful to alleviate tourist anxiety. Therefore, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and social support theory were used to explore how to alleviate tourist anxiety from the dual perspectives of the government and the destination. The results indicate that there are seven configurations for alleviating tourists’ psychological anxiety, and the role of both government and destination are core factors. Among them, the positive destination image is indispensable. Moreover, there is a substitution between crisis management effectiveness and destination sustainability. The research deepens the matching relationship between multidimensional antecedents and tourist anxiety, promotes the application of social support theory in tourist negative emotion, and expands the research framework of tourist anxiety influenced by major crisis events. Our findings provide practical implications for the government and tourist destinations in dealing with major crises and contribute to tourism recovery and competitiveness remodelling during COVID-19.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• tourist anxiety
• fsQCA
• social support theory
• government
• tourist destination

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant No.: 42201237] and the Later Funded Projects of Philosophy and Social Science of the Ministry of Education, China: [Grant No.: 22JHQ067].