Does Travel Stage Matter? How Leisure Travellers Perceive Their Privacy Attitudes Towards Personal Data Sharing Before, During, and After Travel

Abstract: People's attitudes towards personal data sharing have been extensively researched, however, limited research studied their evolving nature in across different stages of a leisure trip. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how leisure travellers' attitudes towards sharing personal data change before, during and after travel. Analysing data from an online survey with 318 participants, we found that participants' privacy attitudes towards sharing different personal data vary based on sharing purposes and travel stages. Interestingly, participants exhibited a more relaxed attitude towards sharing commonly sensitive personal data (e.g., name, gender) compared to other types of personal data. This is likely because sharing such data for travel bookings has become essential and widely accepted among travellers when using booking sites, which is in line with previous work stating that information easily obtainable is typically not seen as highly confidential. Moreover, despite participants' self-reported frequent use of social media platforms, content sharing is minimal on TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Twitter. Conversely, Facebook and Instagram were more common for travel-related content sharing. This pattern remains consistent across the three stages of travel, suggesting that the stage of travel does not significantly influence how people share on social media platforms, which has been overlooked in past studies. Furthermore, we discovered that a participant's gender, previous travel frequency, and country of residence can influence their perceptions of personal data sharing at different travel stages, confirming the complex and context-dependent nature of privacy perception and attitudes. Based on the findings observed from this study, we further discuss implications and potential contributions of our work to the privacy and security community in general.