Safety and risk in tourists' destination choices - a cross-cultural study focusing on the destination Israel

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The rise in worldwide terror attacks and the growing number of destinations affected by terrorism, nowadays, leads to an increase in the relevance of research on safety and risk in tourism. Safety and security or the absence of severe physical risk at a destination are seen as basic prerequisites for the touristic development and decisive determinants of tourists' decisions to visit a certain destination. However, actual safety and security risks are less relevant than the individual perception of these risks. An explanation is that destination choices are complex negotiation processes of tourists' expectations, assumptions or attitudes, on the one hand, and the touristic offer as well as specific characteristics of the destinations, on the other hand. Hence, personal travel experience but also living standards or safety and security levels in tourists' home countries play important roles during the decision whether or not to visit a destination. The proposed research project is based on a current DFG funded research project that investigates the influence of safety and security on tourists' destination choices focusing on the destination Israel and source market Germany as a case example (SCHM 850 / 20 1). The continuation of this research project will concentrate on the influence of the factors nationality or cultural background on tourists' destination choices to identify similarities or differences in risk perceptions and the decision to visit a risky destination between tourists with different nationalities. The methodology and key findings about individual destination choice processes of German tourists from the current research project will be adapted and enhanced for four source markets with high relevance for the Israeli tourism industry. The research adopts a dual approach: The macro level approach aims to investigate tourism flows from these source markets to Israel in order to understand temporal and spatial impacts of terrorism on tourism. In the next step, a micro level approach using quantitative and qualitative methods will be applied to comprehend collective travel decisions on the individual level of the tourist. This combination of different perspectives and methodologies addresses past research gaps and allows a more comprehensive analysis of destination choice processes in the context of risk and uncertainty. The key developments of this research project are: 1) the integration of a geographical perspective into tourism research on safety and risk in travel decision making and destination choice processes; 2) the evaluation of the influencing factors nationality and cultural background on the subjective perception of risk and on individual destination choice processes; and 3) the development of a tourism demand model with specific influencing factors directly related to the unique characteristics of the investigated source markets.