Abstract
With the COVID-19 pandemic, safety and hygiene are becoming key criteria for travel decision-making; therefore, understanding tourists’ perception of and response to risk, particularly health risk, becomes more prominent when the tourism industry is one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. After a comprehensive literature review on tourists’ risk perception, this chapter develops a risk perception model in the “tourist-destination relationship” context. Going from a more general discussion on tourists’ risk perception, this chapter reviews the literature on tourists’ health risk perception as a sub-field and illustrates it using a case study. This case study discusses Australian tourists’ risk perception of diseases or illnesses using pre-COVID-19 survey data. Based on the results of the case study, this chapter outlines an interdisciplinary research agenda to understand tourists’ perception of and response to risk in the context of tourist health and safety in the post-COVID-19 era. This chapter concludes with urgent research themes and topics, disciplinary insights, methodology and future opportunities.