Impact of COVID-19 on Tourists’ Travel Intentions and Behaviors: The Case Study of Hong Kong, China

ABSTRACT

Over the past two years, the COVID-19 pandemic had a major worldwide health, economic and daily life impact. Amongst many dramatic consequences, such as major human mobility disruptions at all scales, the tourism sector has been largely affected. This raises the need for the development of quantitative and qualitative research to favor a better understanding of the impact of the pandemic on human travel behaviors. This study introduces a computational approach that combines inference mechanisms and statistics to quantify tourists’ travel behaviors before and during the pandemic by exploring the evolution of the patterns extracted from a local tourism social network from 2019 to 2020 in the city of Hong Kong. The results show that the COVID-19 pandemic 1) has a major influence on travel intentions that mainly swift from journeys with generally long sequences of attractions to rather single attractions;2) lead to a decline when considering connections between popular attractions, while the strength of connections within other attractions increase;3) generates novel patterns such as tourists preferring relaxing visits and even minor attractions. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.