Tourists’ Safety in the Risk Society: Explaining Perceptions of Safety Regarding Future Vacations

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677231199236
• Author: Rob Mawby,Mine Ozascilar
• Date: 01 March 2024

Tourists’Safety in the Risk

Society: Explaining Perceptions

of Safety Regarding Future

Vacations

Rob Mawby

1

and Mine Ozascilar

2

Abstract

While the risk of crime and perceptions of safety have been regularly addressed by criminologists,

this has rarely extended to asking how those considering or taking vacationsperceive their security.

In contrast, tourism researchers regularly focus on perceptions of safety but def‌ine this more

broadly to include, inter alia, safety from health risks and natural disasters. This paper melds the

two disciplines by considering which destinations US residents perceived as unsafe, focusing on

risks from crime, political unrest or terrorism, and health concerns. The research used a crowd-

sourcing platform to collect citizens’perceptions of safety with regard to crime, terrorism/political

disorder, and health problems at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The f‌indings suggest that

health problems were seen as the greatest risk, but not excessively so. Mexico and China were seen

as the most risky countries to visit, although US residents also considered the USA a relatively dan-

gerous place to spend a vacation. Variations in perceptions of safety between subgroups of respon-

dents were greatest for health problems and least for crime, suggesting that fear of crime is

associated with features of everyday life that are less relevant to tourism destinations. The paper

concludes by discussing the relevance of the f‌indings for both the tourism sector and criminology.

Keywords

perceptions of risk, perceptions of safety, safe countries, tourists, terrorism, US citizens’perceptions,

crowdsourcing

Introduction

We live in a “risk society”(Beck, 1992); never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, to criminologists, safety and security are generally perceived in a narrower context than

Beck envisaged: to involve crime, public disorder, and terrorism incidents. Community safety is thus

envisaged within a relatively narrow set of parameters. In contrast, tourism specialists use the concept

1

Rural Criminology, Harper Adams University, Ivybridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

2

Sociology, Bahcesehir Universitesi, Istanbul, Turkey

Corresponding Author:

Rob Mawby, Rural Criminology, Harper Adams University, Ivybridge, UK of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Email: professorrobmawby@hotmail.com

Original Article

International Criminal Justice Review

2024, Vol. 34(1) 69-86

© 2023 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10575677231199236

journals.sagepub.com/home/icj

of safety to include environmental hazards, health threats, and man-made disasters, while both interna-

tional bodies (United Nations Development Programme, 1994) and national governments (Department

of Homeland Security, 2021; Homeland Security Council, 2007; UK Cabinet Off‌ice, 2008, 2017)

have considered security to cover natural hazards and technological or accidental hazards, as well as

intentional harms. In the USA, for example, the Department of Homeland Security lists, among

others, avalanches, hazardous materials incidents, hurricanes, pandemics, and wildf‌ires on its website.

1

The COVID-19 pandemic may thus be viewed as a security issue in its own right. But it is only

one of a number of safety concerns that confront modern society:

Fear determines the attitude towards life. Security is displacing freedom and equality from the highest

position on the scale of values. (Beck, 2009, p. 8)

However, as Beck himself acknowledged, some risks are considered acceptable: we may as rational

actors deploy cost-benef‌it analysis in considering that the benef‌its to be derived from certain choices out-

weigh the risks. Furthermore, risk is situationally and temporally located: the chance of being attacked

outside a bar at night is greater than that of being attacked on a suburban street in daylight, and citizens

perceive dangers to be greater after dark. This is well researched among criminologists. However, there is

a notable lack of criminological research on perceptions of risk vis a vis travelers’perceptions of safety

abroad. That is, which countries or parts of the world do tourists perceive to be risky, and what do they

consider unsafe about these countries? And how far do the benef‌its outweigh the risks? Tourism research-

ers frequently address these questions, comparing risk and safety with regard to various threats that tour-

ists might face. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how far tourists see some countries as

less safe than others and whether they view countries as safe/unsafe overall or differentiate for different

risks. This is an important issue for academics and practitioners in a risk society.

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism industry has focused even more on the impact of

threats such as coronavirus on international travel (Brouder, 2020; Gössling et al., 2020; Gunay

et al., 2020; Qiu et al., 2020; Sigala, 2020; UNWTO, 2020). However, criminologists’principal

focus has been on the impact of the pandemic and resulting lockdowns on crime (see for

example: Ashby, 2020; Felson et al., 2020; Hodgkinson & Andresen, 2020; Mohler et al., 2020).

Our current research offers a different perspective: that is, how people’s perspectives of risk regard-

ing health issues sit alongside their concerns about “traditional”law and order concerns. Our mea-

surement of risk is couched in terms of whether or not respondents would avoid traveling to specif‌ic

countries because they were concerned about how safe they were. Using this def‌inition, we take data

from a crowdsourcing survey of US residents to address three questions:

•How do citizens perceive risk in the context of their choices of where to spend a vacation?

•Do their concerns over safe destinations vary according to the nature of the risk?

•Can we distinguish between more and less risk-averse US citizens?

The article is divided into three main sections. In the f‌irst, we review and contrast previous research

by criminologists and tourism academics. Then, we describe our ongoing research. Finally, we

address our f‌indings in respect of US residents’perceptions of unsafe destinations.

Literature Review

Risk in Criminological Discourses

Risk has traditionally been of concern to criminologists largely in the context of crime and polit-

ical unrest. It encompasses both objective risk, the chance that one will be the victim of a crime, and

70 International Criminal Justice Review 34(1)