Escape or stay? Effects of haze pollution on domestic travel: Comparative analysis of different regions in China.

Haze pollution has significant impacts on tourist perception and behaviour, including a sharp increase in risk perception and a decline in tourism experience quality. However, given the intervention of multiple factors, whether these impacts necessarily have a negative effect on the overall scale of regional tourism remains unknown. Hence, this paper explored the overall effect of haze pollution on domestic travel. Using 28 major cities in China as examples, we employed a two-way fixed effect panel model to investigate this issue. Combined with the comparisons between the results of different subgroups, including high cities, medium cities, low cities, outbreak cities and non-outbreak cities, this study found that there was no significant effect of haze concentration on domestic travel, but public awareness of haze pollution had a significant positive effect on that. Meanwhile, public awareness exerted a negative moderating effect of haze concentration and domestic travel. The findings are beneficial for understanding the new situation faced by the tourism industry, and several suggestions are provided for policy makers and travel agencies.