Motivating factors for tourists to adopt and recommend vaccine tourism

Abstract

AbstractVaccine tourism is a new type of medical tourism that allows tourists to travel internationally to receive the vaccine occultation while they are traveling. There are strong possibilities that vaccine tourism will grow in popularity due to recent COVID-19 vaccine discrepancy between rich and poor countries and uncertainty of the current and future variation in diseases. Vaccine tourism can play important role to revive the stagnant tourism industry resulted from COVID-19 pandemic and serve as possible alternative type of tourism package for the future. This study aims to investigate factors that influence potential tourists to adopt vaccine tourism. Two hundred and fifty-four questionnaires were collected through tourism social media sites in Thailand. PLS-SEM was conducted to examine the causal relationships. The findings show that innovative and informative users are more likely to adopt vaccine tourism. The study confirms the need to consider personal attitudes when studying behavioral intentions. Furthermore, it highlights opportunities for the tourism industry to further promote the new type of medical tourism to the innovative and informative tourists.

Keywords

• vaccine tourism
• behavioral intention
• information seeking motive
• personal innovativeness
• social media