Measuring the Impact of Greece as a Safe Branding Tourist Destination: Evidence from Spain and Greece

Abstract

After the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, many tourist destinations promoted a safe, COVID-free image to attract tourists. The main purpose of this paper is to examine and analyze the effect that the image of a place as a safe tourist destination (STD)-in our case, Greece-can have on the decision-making processes of tourists who were willing to take summer holidays in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined the relationships between destination safety perceptions, trust, attractive attributes of destinations, travel intentions, and health-protective behavior for domestic and inbound tourists from Spain. This study confirms differences in destination safety perceptions among domestic and inbound tourists from countries that have suffered significant negative impacts due to the novel coronavirus.