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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH Int. J. Tourism Res. 10, 315–327 (2008) Published online 3 April 2008 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.664

Perceived Travel Risks: The Traveller Perspective and Manageability
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Penny M. Simpson1,* and Judy A. Siguaw2 College of Business Administration, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, Texas, USA 2Cornell-Nanyang Institute of Hospitality Management, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang Business School, Singapore ABSTRACT buying general products or services as financial, performance, physical, psychological, social, and time or convenience (e.g. Conchar et al., 2004). Likewise, risk has been examined in the more specialised tourism/travel literature using virtually the same classificationsystem (e.g. Levantis and Gani, 2000; Pizam and Fleischer, 2002; Hall et al., 2003). Because these classifications of risk used in the travel literature were developed for risks in general and not necessarily for perceived risks that correspond with travelling, the typology may be overly broad, preventing appropriate managerial response. For example, the assessment of psychological risk in priorliterature can range from ‘a disappointing travel experience’ (Sönmez and Graefe, 1998a) to ‘a vacation will not reflect my personality or self-image’ (Roehl and Fesenmaier, 1992), although each perceived risk item within the category likely requires a different type of tourism management response. This limitation of using risk categories borrowed from non-travel-related research was noted by Dolnicar(2005, p. 205): ‘standard risk inventories might not be the best starting point for perceived-risk studies in the context of tourism research. More marketdriven insight into the nature of tourists’ fears and their precise components is therefore required’. With such a generic and broad typology of items comprising each category of risk that may significantly affect travel intentions, how are travelmanagers to appropriately target and quell concerns of prospective travellers? For the most part, previous travel risk research also suffers from a second limitation. The types of travel risk categories have been determined by experts before surveying respondents, rather than by respondents who have identified their own perceived travel
Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Although a largenumber of studies both in and out of the tourism literature have examined perceived risk, the risk categories utilized are often too broad and are not generated from the perspective of current and potential travellers. This deficiency in the travel research is addressed in this study by asking more than 2,000 respondents to identify their concerns when travelling. All respondent concerns werecontent analyzed to derive ten travel-specific risks and the relationship of the identified risks with demographic characteristics of the respondents was examined. The identification of these potential and actual traveller-driven travel-risks allows tourism officials to better understand how to respond to alleviate traveller concerns and encourage travel. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Received 4December 2007; Revised 29 January 2008; Accepted 14 February 2008

Keywords: travel; risk; demographics; risk management. INTRODUCTION he topic of perceived risk has been the subject of considerable research over the decades. Scholars have categorised the types of perceived risks associated with
*Correspondence to: P. Simpson, College of Business Administration, The University of Texas-PanAmerican, 1201 West University Drive, Edinburg, TX 78541-2999, USA. E-mail: pmsimpson@utpa.edu

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316 risks. For example, in one of the first articles to explore travel risk, Roehl and Fesenmaier (1992) draw on other disciplines to define likely general categories of risks that ‘would seem to have considerable face validity in the context of pleasure travel’ (p. 18). Subsequent perceived risk...