The impact of human rights issues on travellers’ destination decision

Abstract

Human rights are a global matter, and they have an impact on everyone’s lives. For some, the impact is a safe life in secure environment, whereas for some the effect is the violation of those rights. Human rights are to ensure that everyone, regardless of their attributes, have a right to liberty and safe, equal living. Human right issues are vastly affected by political situations and have an impact on the overall safety of the destination. The purpose of this research is to find out how much human right issues in the destinations affect travellers’ destination choices. The supporting questions are how much of research travellers’ do regarding human rights before travelling, how much political situations affect their choices, and which safety factors are taken into consideration before travelling.

The theoretical framework consists of human rights issues, political instability, safety and travellers’ motivations and values. Human right issues are considered from three different viewpoints; issues that affect directly to individuals, systematic issues and oppression, and administrative issues. The focus of the framework is how these issues are visible to travellers and how they might affect to their vacation. Political instability is analysed from three perspectives as well. The general environment of politics and what effects it has, political conflicts within the country and between different countries and safety issues that are at least partly caused by political decisions. One part of the framework focuses on travellers’ motivations to travel and general values they have and how the values affect their consumption.

Quantitative research was chosen as the research method, as the goal of the research is to find out “how much”. The research was executed with a survey as it is efficient and a comparatively reliable research method that does not require a lot of resources. The survey consists of Likert scale questions, where the respondents determine their preference or degree of agreement on given statements on a scale of one to five, as well as open questions to allow the respondents to expand their thoughts regarding the topic. The survey was distributed on social media channels and got a total of 148 responses within the two-week period it was open.

The research showed that vast majority of respondents do care about human rights being achieved in the destination, but not as many were necessarily aware of the issues or willing to spend time on researching the topic. Same goes with safety, it was highly valued by the respondents, but the results implied that the respondents do not prepare in case of safety hazards while travelling. Majority of the respondents would not travel to a country that has clear human right violations, even if it was not visible to them while travelling. Democracy, liveable wages and equal treatment of minorities were important factors the respondents considered before travelling.