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1. Introduction
The transmission of Covid-19 from China to rest of the world in early 2020 (Kaushal and Srivastava, 2021; Sigala, 2020) forced many governments to impose travel restrictions, social distancing and other policies to suppress the spread of the pandemic (Fotiadis et al., 2021; Yeh, 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). Many industries, such as tourism and hospitality, faced significant loss of customers and therefore are forced to lay off employees (Sharma et al., 2021). Although Taiwan was relatively successful in the beginning to suppress the outbreak (Yeh, 2021), the second wave of the outbreak hit Taiwan quite severely after 253 days (Davidson, 2021). The main cause of failure was the ease of travel restrictions, which led to a new round of tightened policies that banned the operation of tourism-related businesses again (Galvin et al., 2020). Even after the introduction of vaccine and the subsequent ease of restrictions, most Taiwanese citizens are still reluctant to go out.
Because the theory of planned behavior (TPB) proposed by Ajzen (1991) is an effective tool to understand human’s behavioral intention and the process of decision-making, it is chosen to conduct this study. Several studies (Prasetyo et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2021) have recently been published to examine the behavioral intention of tourists during COVID-19 pandemic. Prasetyo et al. (2020) extended TPB by integrating additional components to evaluate factors affecting the perceived effectiveness of COVID-19 prevention. The paper focused more on the perceived effectiveness of prevention measures than the travel intention. Han et al. (2020) studied how perceived knowledge of COVID-19 affects attitude and subjective norm and how psychological risk moderates some of the causal relationship of TPB. Seong and Hong (2021) expand TPB by introducing the COVID-19 risk perception as a new construct to enhance the traditional model. There are studies (Liu et al., 2021; Rahmafitria et al., 2021) that argued that attitude is strongly influenced by an individual’s perception which explain why attitude may lose some predictability in a certain context. The above studies were to test the effectiveness and prove popularity of applying TPB in an attempt to understand travel intention during the pandemic. Therefore, an extended TPB model will be used for this study.
Although earlier studies...