2. Face Mask, Penny and Holiday Pictures
Jozsef Soma Talas, Undergraduate Student Prize Winner 2024
Our perception of certain risks can influence our decision-making processes and behaviour. While different people can have distinct perceptions of risks and context in which they frame their decisions of where and how to travel, there is hardly any people who do not take risk into consideration. Hence, given the global rise of uncertainties today, the places we retreat to and rest in our free time is constantly evolving.
This display demonstrates how the perception of the Covid-19 pandemic and the following cost-of-living crisis has influenced holiday travel behaviour over time in the last 5 years, disrupting the pre-existing equilibrium. While the latter only provided a monetary constraint on where people travel, the former brought about fear and legal constraints on top of financial considerations.
These led to a fluctuation in the number of travellers, as the increase in risk perception has negatively impacted holiday travel in the Covid years, with many people choosing not to travel at all. On the contrary, the cost-of-living crisis only caused a slight decline in overall tourism, and a boom in domestic tourism, as people re-budgeted their holidays. Although the holiday travel is on the rise again today, new risks necessitate permanent need for research in this field.
