An exploratory survey on the perceived risk of COVID-19 and travelling

In the face of an emerging and novel pandemic, perceptions of its danger and probability of being affected can influence how an individual take precautionary actions. We performed an exploratory study to examine how travellers perceive the risk-related to COVID-19 and how the outbreak has affected their commuting and non-commuting travel activities. Building on previous studies, we propose a working hypothesis of personal risk perception and trip adjustment decision and collect information to preliminary check our hypothesis. We report on our work, and the results of an online survey carried out between March 12-19, 2020, which collected 71 responds from countries in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East in this working paper. Our results illustrate how the respondents altered their travel, their rationales, the precautionary actions they took, their foremost concerns, the sources of information they based their decisions on, and how useful they found teleconference as an alternative. Also, we observed their risk-related perception concerning the proposed model. We found several potential correlations and some regional and country variations but were unable to draw any definitive conclusion due to the limited sample size. We share our preliminary results here for discussion purposes.