Purpose This research aims to investigate the development of travel anxiety, examine its variations across several stages of tourism and explore its impact on tourists. Design/methodology/approach This study explored the phenomenon of travel anxiety using the grounded theory methodology. Interview transcripts from 22 travelers and 1,629 social media posts from Xiaohongshu and Sina Weibo were analyzed with NVivo 11.0. Through data saturation testing, five core categories were ultimately identified: stressors, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, appraisal outcomes and coping strategies, revealing the key factors influencing travel anxiety and their interrelationships. Findings Grounded in stress and coping theory, the findings indicate that travel anxiety fluctuates across different stages of travel, shaped by tourists’ appraisals and coping strategies. Travel anxiety typically peaks during the preparation phase, declines initially during the trip, fluctuates throughout and rises briefly before subsiding posttrip. Notably, mild and transient travel anxiety was generally found to be beneficial. Research limitations/implications The relationship between travel, tourism and mental health often begins with positive emotions, framing tourism as an enjoyable activity that fosters mental well-being. However, travel can also induce stress, leading to travel anxiety – an emotion commonly associated with negative outcomes. Interestingly, travel anxiety can also produce positive effects. Originality/value This study adopts an interdisciplinary framework bridging psychology and tourism, advocating for a more integrated approach to emotional research in tourism. While recent scholarship has been dominated by marketing-driven perspectives, often at the expense of psychological depth, this study contributes robust psychological insights to enrich the understanding of tourists’ emotional experiences and to inform future research in this vital area.
Xiong et al. (Sat,) studied this question.