Motivation to participate in ecotourism activities during Covid-19 pandemic

The problem statement relies on understanding how the internal or external factors may affect the domestic tourists to participate in ecotourism activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. The issue arises when people realize the perceived risk before decision making happens in choosing tourism destinations that create tourist behavioral patterns. To indicate the tourist behavior required a lot of research and that can be a major problem. Then, the current developments that invite people to explore and make ecotourism destinations for recreation may cause severe damage to sustainability such as climate change or uncontrollable waste. Hence, as the Covid-19 pandemic is still new so the research development did not have sufficient information, and only a few references of research can be referred from the respective sources. This study is about the motivation to participate in ecotourism activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the relationships between perceived risk, environmental belief, and leisure pursuit towards motivation to participate in ecotourism activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. This research is using a quantitative method where 208 data has been collected through convenience sampling from local respondents in Malaysia. The instrument used for the data collection is the questionnaire which can obtain different characteristics from the respondents like gender, preference, perception, personality, and so on. Frankly, the analysis used descriptive analysis, reliability analysis, and Pearson Correlation to indicate the statistics of respondents’ responses on what motivates the intention to participate in ecotourism activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, the findings of this research found that perceived risk is not a significant factor while the environmental belief and leisure pursuit is a significant factor that influences the motivation to participate in ecotourism activities during covid-19. The research also contributes to the value of knowledge on factors of motivation to participate in ecotourism activities during the Covid-19 pandemic.