Examining tourist consumer behaviour in the shadow of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented social upheaval. The freedom of movement and travel that had previously been the norm was curtailed, and states and people faced a new threat. Many people book and finalise their summer travel in spring, but in 2020 the spring period was marked by total uncertainty until the opening in early June. This research aims to explore the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on Hungarian society’s perception of risk when planning and implementing summer holidays in 2020. To this end, qualitative data was collected by interviewing 111 people through structured interviews. The data were also quantified using three-level dimension construction and magnitude coding. The results showed that health and mental fears directly related to coronavirus and performance and financial risk perceptions indirectly related to coronavirus were the most dominant among the threats mentioned. In addition to information gathering, destination choice was the primary risk reduction tool, but this did not mean that domestic travellers felt utterly safe or less at risk than those who travelled abroad. Our findings include implications for both academics in the social sciences and practitioners.