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1. Introduction
Risk in travel and tourism has become an important research area in recent years because of the implications it has for tourist decision-making processes. The perception of risk has been shown to be one of the most important aspects that tourists consider when choosing between alternative destinations and when deciding upon the type and quantity of expenditure (Melly and Hanrahan, 2020; Zhang et al., 2020).
Risks perceptions are different for women than for men, suggesting that gender may play a role in the way human beings react to different levels of risk across society (Zhang et al., 2014). Uncovering the gender differences in the relationships between risk perception and human behaviour is important for designing more effective and efficient risk management policies (Melly and Hanrahan, 2020; Zhang et al., 2020; Wen et al., 2020). Yang et al. (2017, p. 97) pointed out that “there is limited understanding in relation to how women interpret gendered travel risk, and how risk influences their travel behaviour”. Therefore, there is a gap in understanding tourist risk behaviour according to gender groups (Yang et al., 2017; Gao et al., 2020).
The pioneering work of Roehl and Fesenmaier (1992) focussed on the perception of risk in tourism identifying the basic dimensions: physical-equipment risk, holiday risk and destination risk. It pointed out that relationships between risk perception and travel behaviour are situation-specific and not generalisable. From a phenomenological point of view, Bunton et al. (2004) suggested that the gendering of risk is a more complex phenomenon that needs to be understood.
The objective of the present research is to investigate the influence of the different gender types on the relationships between tourists’ risk perceptions, their visiting intentions and their destination’s image. Risk is a subjective perception that varies in its different dimensions and its behavioural relationships can be conditioned by specific individual characteristics including personality traits, gender, culture and prior experience (Godovykh et al., 2021).
This paper contributes to the literature first by considering the impact of a more complete classification of different tourist risks on destination image and visit intentions and secondly, by evaluating the differentiation of these impacts by gender groups. This is relevant when targeting specific groups of tourists and...