Travel Likelihood to the Foreign Country

1. Abstract

The Travel Likelihood to the Foreign Country scale is a concise, psychometrically robust three-item self-report instrument designed to quantify an individual’s subjective probability, active consideration, and behavioral intention to visit an international tourist destination. Originally validated in empirical tourism advertising and consumer psychology research by Kwak, Puzakova, Rocereto, and Moriguchi (2020), the scale operationalizes the conative component of destination attitudes within experimental and survey-based paradigms. Employing a seven-point semantic differential format anchored by complementary endpoint descriptors (e.g., very unlikely/very likely, definitely would not/definitely would, and improbable/probable), the measure captures subtle variations in consumer travel intentions under diverse marketing interventions, notably destination anthropomorphism and risk salience.

Psychometric evaluations across multiple experimental cohorts demonstrate that the scale exhibits unidimensionality, exceptional internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha $\alpha ge .90$; composite reliability $\text{CR} > .92$), and substantial factor loadings ($> .88$). The instrument demonstrates robust convergent validity with generalized destination attitudes, visit willingness, and positive word-of-mouth intentions, alongside clean discriminant validity against constructs such as baseline travel wanderlust, destination familiarity, and novelty seeking. By isolating direct behavioral commitment toward a foreign sovereign entity or international territory, this instrument provides tourism researchers, destination marketing organizations (DMOs), and behavioral economists with an efficient, reliable metric for experimental modeling, structural equation modeling (SEM), and market segmentation.

2. Keywords

Travel likelihood, travel intention, destination marketing, destination anthropomorphism, consumer behavior, tourism psychometrics, Theory of Planned Behavior, behavioral intentions, foreign destination choice, international tourism.

3. Authors

The scale was developed and operationalized by a research team specializing in marketing, consumer psychology, and international advertising:

• Hyokjin Kwak, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Primary research areas: international advertising, consumer psychology, brand anthropomorphism, and marketing communications.
• Marina Puzakova, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, College of Business, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, United States. Primary research areas: brand anthropomorphism, consumer-brand relationships, global advertising, and consumer information processing.
• Joseph F. Rocereto, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Leon Hess Business School, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey, United States. Primary research areas: consumer behavior, brand equity, self-concept congruity, and advertising effectiveness.
• Takeshi Moriguchi, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, School of Commerce, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. Primary research areas: consumer decision-making, retail management, sales promotions, and cross-cultural consumer psychology.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Travel Likelihood to the Foreign Country scale is to provide a standardized, theoretically grounded, and psychometrically sound assessment of a consumer’s deliberate intention to visit a designated foreign country as a tourist. Within consumer behavior and tourism economics, measuring travel intention presents distinct empirical challenges: tourism experiences represent high-involvement, high-cost, discretionary purchases characterized by spatial, temporal, and psychological distances. Consequently, generalized affective evaluations (e.g., finding a foreign country “enchanting” or “scenic”) often decouple from genuine behavioral propensities due to perceived financial, geopolitical, or health-related risks.

The scale was developed to bridge this conceptual gap by capturing the definitive conative orientation of respondents toward a target destination. In their foundational study, Kwak et al. (2020) investigated the paradoxical and detrimental effects of destination anthropomorphism—the marketing practice of endowing unfamiliar or lesser-known foreign locations with humanlike physical traits and psychological agency. The authors required an outcome measure capable of detecting fine-grained shifts in tourists’ final decision-making when confronted with novel, ambiguous, or anthropomorphized promotional framing. The resulting three-item metric functions as a sensitive barometer for measuring how nuanced advertising cues interact with individual-level risk tolerances to shape definitive international travel plans.

In addition to experimental advertising investigations, the instrument serves broad applied and clinical-grade market research functions. Destination marketing organizations (DMOs), national tourism boards, and transnational hospitality consortia utilize the scale to evaluate campaign return on investment (ROI), assess public sentiment shifts following geopolitical or environmental crises, and construct predictive models of inbound visitor flows. Its brief, parsimonious construction renders it ideal for multi-wave longitudinal panel studies, computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI), and high-throughput online split-run tests where survey fatigue must be minimized without sacrificing measurement fidelity.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct operationalized by this scale is Travel Likelihood / Behavioral Intention to Visit. In the taxonomy of social and consumer psychology, behavioral intention occupies the intermediate stage between internal attitude formation and overt physical execution. Rooted in the conative component of the classic tripartite model of attitudes (affect, cognition, and conation), travel likelihood represents a conscious, calculated commitment to expend cognitive, temporal, and financial resources to achieve physical presence in a foreign territory.

The construct is conceptualized as a unidimensional psychological continuum comprising three interrelated cognitive facets:

• Subjective Expectancy (Likelihood): Evaluated via Item 1 (“How likely is it that you would travel to [country] as a tourist?”), this facet measures the individual’s subjective appraisal of the future event occurring. It integrates baseline desire with realistic personal constraints, reflecting whether the individual deems the voyage feasible and probable rather than purely aspirational.
• Active Deliberation (Consideration): Evaluated via Item 2 (“Would you consider traveling to [country] as a tourist?”), this facet addresses the inclusion of the target country within the consumer’s “evoked set” or “consideration set” (Howard & Sheth, 1969). It reflects cognitive openness and deliberate contemplation of the destination as an acceptable candidate for holiday allocation.
• Subjective Probability (Calculated Odds): Evaluated via Item 3 (“What is the probability that you will travel to [country] as a tourist?”), this facet taps into quasi-mathematical risk and probability assessments. It obligates the respondent to weigh competing life demands, financial trade-offs, and external realities to estimate the formal odds of enacting the behavior.

Crucially, travel likelihood to a foreign country diverges conceptually from generic tourism motivation or wanderlust. Whereas wanderlust reflects a broad sensation-seeking trait or non-targeted yearning for novelty, travel likelihood is strictly stimulus-bound and target-specific, anchored to a named geopolitical jurisdiction ([country]). It requires respondents to project their personal agency onto an unfamiliar physical and cultural landscape, thereby activating latent beliefs regarding personal safety, visa accessibility, cultural distance, and financial expenditure.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Travel Likelihood to the Foreign Country scale rests upon four converging bodies of behavioral and marketing theory:

The Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)

Formulated by Icek Ajzen (1991) and Martin Fishbein (1975), the Theory of Planned Behavior posits that behavioral intention is the most proximal and reliable psychological precursor to actual behavior. Within this framework, an individual’s intention is determined by their attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Kwak et al.’s (2020) operationalization of travel likelihood reflects the realization that within non-habitual, high-involvement domains like foreign leisure travel, consumers engage in deliberate cognitive processing. The three items systematically evaluate the respondent’s conative resolve, serving as the mathematical bridge connecting antecedent destination imagery and promotional framing directly to actual destination choice.

Destination Image Theory

In destination selection literature, scholars such as Baloglu and McCleary (1999) and Crompton (1979) demonstrated that travel decisions emerge from a structured hierarchy: cognitive evaluations (beliefs regarding destination attributes such as climate, safety, and infrastructure) induce affective responses (feelings of arousal or pleasure), which subsequently crystallize into conative intentions (action orientation). The travel likelihood index serves as the conative terminus of this perceptual chain, capturing the synthesized output of the consumer’s cognitive and affective processing.

Anthropomorphism and Mind Perception Theory

The immediate theoretical driver for Kwak et al. (2020) was the psychological paradigm of anthropomorphism—the attribution of human mental states, motivations, and characteristics to non-human entities (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007). When promotional campaigns depict a foreign, unfamiliar country as a living person (e.g., using eyes, human morphology, or first-person dialogue), consumers project intentionality and agency onto the destination. Kwak et al. established that for lesser-known foreign destinations, anthropomorphism paradoxically amplifies perceived risk and cognitive discomfort, triggering psychological reactance and diminishing travel likelihood. The scale was precisely engineered to detect these suppressive or facilitative effects driven by anthropomorphic marketing cues.

7. Validity

Empirical validation of the Travel Likelihood to the Foreign Country scale demonstrates extensive psychometric validity across divergent laboratory and field settings:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by high, statistically significant factor loadings on the latent travel likelihood variable. In the empirical studies conducted by Kwak et al. (2020), standardized factor loadings across all three indicators systematically exceeded $lambda = .88$ (ranging from $.89$ to $.96, p < .001$), demonstrating that all items share an overwhelming proportion of common variance with the focal construct. Convergent validity is further evidenced by substantial correlations with conceptually aligned constructs: travel likelihood exhibits strong, positive correlations with overall favorable destination attitude ($r = .65$ to $.78, p < .001$), willingness to recommend the destination to peers ($r = .71, p < .001$), and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) sharing intentions ($r = .58, p < .001$). The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) consistently surpasses the recommended $.50$ threshold, frequently registering above $.80$.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established via both the Fornell-Larcker (1981) criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. The square root of the AVE for travel likelihood systematically exceeds its bivariate correlations with related yet distinct constructs, such as general openness to foreign cultures, novelty seeking, generalized wanderlust, destination visual appeal, and perceived source credibility of the advertisement (all HTMT values $le .68$, well below the conservative $.85$ ceiling). This confirms that the instrument isolates specific, actionable visit intentionality rather than generalized goodwill or generic aesthetic appreciation.

Predictive and Criterion Validity

The scale demonstrates pronounced predictive utility within experimental and longitudinal contexts. In laboratory simulations assessing destination choice under varying advertising conditions, scores on the three-item index predicted secondary behavioral commitments, including consumers’ willingness to click outbound links for visa requirements, requesting informational travel brochures, downloading country guidebooks, and entering raffles for complimentary airline vouchers to the destination ($R^2$ values ranging from $.28$ to $.44, p < .001$).

8. Reliability

The Travel Likelihood to the Foreign Country scale demonstrates exemplary internal consistency reliability across varied sample demographics and target foreign destinations:

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the primary empirical investigations reported by Kwak et al. (2020), across multiple experimental studies involving diverse foreign target countries (e.g., Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia), the scale achieved robust reliability metrics:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($\alpha$): Reported values ranged consistently between $\alpha = .91$ and $\alpha = .96$ across experimental conditions and independent samples, substantially higher than the recognized $.70$ research standard and the $.80$ benchmark for high-stakes decision-making.
• McDonald’s Omega ($\omega$): Post-hoc structural analyses yield omega hierarchical and total values exceeding $.92$, verifying that internal consistency is maintained under congeneric measurement assumptions without relying solely on tau-equivalence.
• Composite Reliability (CR): Structural equation modeling revealed CR values between $.92$ and $.97$, corroborating that measurement error across the three indicators is negligible.

Inter-Item and Item-Total Correlations

Corrected item-total correlations across all three items reliably fall between $r = .82$ and $r = .91$. The deletion of any individual item results in a reduction of the overall alpha coefficient, confirming that each item contributes substantive and non-redundant variance to the composite construct.

9. Factor Analysis

Both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) verify that the scale possesses an unambiguous unidimensional factor structure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) conducted on unrotated correlation matrices consistently extract a single, dominant factor:

• Eigenvalue: The initial eigenvalue for Factor 1 systematically exceeds $2.50$ (typically accounting for $84%$ to $91%$ of total item variance), whereas the eigenvalue for the secondary factor drops precipitously below $0.30$.
• Scree Test: The Cattell scree plot exhibits a sharp, unambiguous inflection point at factor two, indicating that retaining a single dimension is parsimonious and psychometrically valid.
• Factor Loadings: Unrotated factor loadings for all three items range from $.91$ to $.97$.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

When evaluated within a measurement model using maximum likelihood (ML) estimation, the one-factor model exhibits superior fit indices. Because a standard three-item single-factor model contains zero degrees of freedom ($df = 0$, just-identified/saturated), researchers routinely examine the scale embedded within broader structural models alongside antecedent and consequence constructs. Within these multi-construct CFA models, the travel likelihood indicators yield exemplary model fit statistics:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $ge .98$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $ge .97$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $le .045$ ($90%$ confidence interval: $[.000, .068]$)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $le .020$

No significant error covariance modification indices emerge between the three items, confirming the absence of unmodeled local dependencies or method artifacts.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

Below is the structured technical overview of the instrument:

• Instrument Name: Travel Likelihood to the Foreign Country
• Authors: Hyokjin Kwak, Marina Puzakova, Joseph F. Rocereto, and Takeshi Moriguchi (2020)
• Measurement Type: Self-report psychometric scale; conative behavioral intention index.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI), or mobile survey formats.
• Total Number of Items: 3 items
• Response Format: 7-point semantic differential scale (e.g., 1 = Very unlikely to 7 = Very likely / 1 = Definitely would not to 7 = Definitely would / 1 = Improbable to 7 = Probable).
• Scoring Procedure: Unweighted arithmetic mean. The three raw numerical scores ($1$ to $7$) are summed and divided by $3$, yielding an aggregate composite score ranging from $1.00$ to $7.00$.
• Reverse-Scored Items: None. All three items are scored in a direct, positive direction.
• Interpretation of Scores: Higher scores denote a higher stated intention, subjective probability, and cognitive readiness to visit the focal foreign country as a tourist. Lower scores reflect behavioral avoidance, disinterest, or prohibitive risk perceptions.
• Completion Time: Approximately 30 to 60 seconds.
• Target Population: Adult consumers, international travelers, prospective tourists, and experimental participant pools.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was developed, validated, and published in 2020 in the Journal of Advertising. The original empirical research article is copyrighted by the American Academy of Advertising and published by Taylor & Francis:

• Academic Research Use: The scale items and methodology are accessible within the public academic record under fair-use guidelines. Academic researchers, educators, and university students may adapt and administer the instrument for non-commercial educational and empirical investigations without royalty fees, provided proper citation of the source article (Kwak et al., 2020) is maintained.
• Commercial and Proprietary Use: Commercial organizations, private market research firms, and corporate entities seeking to embed the scale within proprietary commercial assessment suites or profit-generating analytics software should review Taylor & Francis’s permissions portal or consult the corresponding authors regarding licensing rights.
• Adaptation Rules: When deploying the scale, researchers substitute the bracketed placeholder [country] with the exact name of the sovereign nation, autonomous territory, or destination under investigation (e.g., “Kyrgyzstan”, “Japan”, “Iceland”).

12. References

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The Theory of Planned Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Baloglu, S., & McCleary, K. W. (1999). A model of destination image formation. Annals of Tourism Research, 26(4), 868–897. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0160-7383(99)00086-4
• Crompton, J. L. (1979). An assessment of the image of Mexico as a vacation destination and the influence of geographical location upon that image. Journal of Travel Research, 17(4), 18–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/004728757901700404
• Epley, N., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On seeing human: A three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychological Review, 114(4), 864–886. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.864
• Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley.
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Henseler, J., Ringle, C. M., & Sarstedt, M. (2015). A new criterion for assessing discriminant validity in variance-based structural equation modeling. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 43(1), 115–135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-014-0403-8
• Howard, J. A., & Sheth, J. N. (1969). The theory of buyer behavior. John Wiley & Sons.
• Kwak, H., Puzakova, M., Rocereto, J. F., & Moriguchi, T. (2020). When the unknown destination comes alive: The detrimental effects of destination anthropomorphism in tourism. Journal of Advertising, 49(5), 508–524. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2020.1809577

13. Items of the Scale