Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Tourists' Motivation to Travel to Boracay amidst Covid-19 Pandemic

2021; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.20431/2455-0043.0702001

2455-0043

Joy Agapito, Patricia Oabel, Kathlene Sj, Kathlene Oabel,

Diverse Aspects of Tourism Research

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the [1] World Travel and Tourism Council (2019), made an Economic Impact Report in 2019 where it was stated that the travel and tourism sector has reached 3.5% growth surpassing the global economy growth of 2.5% over the past nine years.Through the 330 million jobs it contributed to the 10.4% of the global Gross Domestic Product, it garnered a total of 6.8% total exports and 27.4% of global services exports.However, when Coronavirus Disease 2019 began its outbreak on December 31, 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China.The World Health Organization established a global pandemic status for COVID-19 at the beginning of March 2020 due to its rapid proliferation, the COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which spreads through close contact with another person [2] (WHO, 2020b).Also, it can be transmitted by an infected person"s mouth or nose in small liquid particles.It may be through coughing, sneezing, speaking, singing, or breathing heavily [3] (Martin, 2020).As the world faces the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism and hospitality industry were not able to escape from its drastic impacts.It became one the most affected industries due to the global travel restrictions in order to reduce the risk of spreading the virus.The decrease in tourist demand, resulted in flight cancellations, temporary closure of tourism destinations and establishments, and employee retrenchment.According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization almost 96% of destinations worldwide introduced travel restrictions and implemented preventive measures to confine the virus in their respective countries and reduce the risk of infecting others [4] (UNWTO, 2020a).As of April 6, 2020, about 43% are completely/partially closed its borders for tourists coming from the countries that are infected by the virus, 27% have suspended some international flights, 21% Abstract: Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic was made known to the world, it brought challenges to its people and its economic development.The Tourism and Hospitality Industry has been greatly affected as the global travel restriction has been implemented, due to this reason the researchers aimed to help the industry to bounce back amidst pandemic.The study determined the willingness of tourists to travel amidst pandemic through the push and pull travel motivators, along with the guidelines and protocols set by the government agencies.The destination used in this study was Boracay Island as it is one of the first tourism bubble that was reopened by the Department of Tourism in the Philippines that requires travel and safety protocols.The push and pull theory were used in the study and was modified to identify the factors and incorporated the protocols to meet the needs of the study.The research design of the study is exploratory research, since the issues and solutions are still developing and to support the study, secondary research was used.To further investigate on how the push and pull travel motivators affect the decision of a traveler, the researchers used the tools such as: purposive sampling method and conducted an online survey with the use of Google Forms that was disseminated to the College of Tourism and Hospitality students of De La Salle University-Dasmariñas through social media platforms.The data was processed and analyzed using the chi-test square.The results show that there is no significant relationship between the demographic profile of the respondents and the push and pull travel motivational factors, but there is a significant relationship between the willingness to travel on both push and pull motivation factors, as well as the duration of stay that show in the pull motivators.