A Study on Impacts of Covid-19 Towards Local Tourist Travel Preferences

Abstract

Nowadays, the tourism sector has become one of the sectors with the highest contribution to Malaysia’s economy. Disease outbreaks have an impact on travel preferences. The current outbreak of Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 has the global population headed to a global panic due to its fatal nature. Malaysia is aware of this pandemic disease and the government has imposed Movement Control Order (MCO) for preventing the spread of the disease. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of COVID-19 towards local tourist travel preferences due to the restrictions under the MCO. This study will use the elements of motivation, accessibility, tourism activities and travel expenditures to determine the relationships of these elements towards travel preferences. The target respondents of this study will be Malaysian tourists or not in Malaysia. This study will be applied to the probability and simple random sampling method. The data collected from target respondents will be analysed into the descriptive analysis, reliability analysis, and Pearson correlation by using SPSS 23.0.