From Fear of Death to Travel Intention: Do Residential Tourism Clusters Matter?

ABSTRACT This study integrates Terror Management Theory with the Social Ecological Model to explain how mortality awareness (MA) shapes travel intention through two pathways: an adaptive meaning‐making route and a maladaptive strain‐based route. Using a survey experiment with US adults and hierarchical regression, structural equation modeling, and multi‐group analysis, we show that MA increases travel intention by strengthening worldview affirmation and self‐transcendence, whereas maladaptive coping suppresses intention. These effects are context‐dependent. Residential tourism clusters—operationalized using the Location Quotient (LQ 7 ) index—moderate the translation of psychological motives into behavioral intention. Transcendence has a stronger positive effect in highly clustered areas, adaptive coping is more influential in low‐cluster contexts, and maladaptive coping is more deterrent in high‐cluster environments. By embedding existential motivation within spatial context, this study extends Terror Management Theory and identifies transcendence as a key mechanism of travel behavior.