Psychological Resilience and Perceived Invulnerability—Critical Factors in Assessing Perceived Risk Related to Travel and Tourism-Related Behaviors of Generation Z

Simona Mălăescu ()
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Simona Mălăescu: Human Geography and Tourism Department, Faculty of Geography, Babeș-Bolyai University, 400060 Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Tourism and Hospitality, 2025, vol. 6, issue 2, 1-20

Abstract: Psychological theory often reminds us that the best predictor of an individual’s future behavior is their prior behavior. Then, the pandemic happened in 2020, and at least for travel behavior and tourism consumption, everything seemed to change, stressing the importance of re-evaluating predictors. In the present study, we aimed to compare the history of travel behavior and tourism consumption with the predicted travel behavior of students coming from Generation Z, along with intrapersonal characteristics influencing risk perception, like psychological resilience and perceived invulnerability. The findings revealed that the pandemic changed the attitude towards travel for tourism-related purposes in both positive and negative directions, restructuring the attitude towards travel for the majority and also revealing many new prospective travelers. Psychological resilience was a significant variable that differentiated the respondents who changed their attitude towards tourism from those who remained consistent in their non-travel behavior and students who planned to travel more during the pandemic. Although subsamples also differed in the mean value of perceived invulnerability, the variable did not prove statistically significant. Almost 50% of the students predicting that they will travel abroad for non-tourism-related purposes in the future year were students who had not traveled abroad before the pandemic.

Keywords: Generation Z; psychological resilience; travel risk assessment; tourism behavior; invulnerability perception; COVID-19-response literature (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z3 Z30 Z31 Z32 Z33 Z38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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