• Catherine Bravo, Valérie Bosch Castells, Susann Zietek-Gutsch, Pierre-Antoine Bodin, Cliona Molony, and Markus Frühwein.
• Sanofi Pasteur, Lyon, France.
• J Travel Med. 2022 Mar 21; 29 (2).

BackgroundTravellers can access online information to research and plan their expeditions/excursions, and seek travel-related health information. We explored German travellers' attitude and behaviour toward vaccination, and their travel-related health information seeking activities.MethodsWe used two approaches: web 'scraping' of comments on German travel-related sites and an online survey. 'Scraping' of travel-related sites was undertaken using keywords/synonyms to identify vaccine- and disease-related posts. The raw unstructured text extracted from online comments was converted to a structured dataset using Natural Language Processing Techniques. Traveller personas were defined using K-means based on the online survey results, with cluster (i.e. persona) descriptions made from the most discriminant features in a distinguished set of observations. The web-scraped profiles were mapped to the personas identified. Travel and vaccine-related behaviours were described for each persona.ResultsWe identified ~2.6 million comments; ~880 k were unique and mentioned ~280 k unique trips by ~65 k unique profiles. Most comments were on destinations in Europe (37%), Africa (21%), Southeast Asia (12%) and the Middle East (11%). Eight personas were identified: 'middle-class family woman', 'young woman travelling with partner', 'female globe-trotter', 'upper-class active man', 'single male traveller', 'retired traveller', 'young backpacker', and 'visiting friends and relatives'. Purpose of travel was leisure in 82-94% of profiles, except the 'visiting friends and relatives' persona. Malaria and rabies were the most commented diseases with 12.7 k and 6.6 k comments, respectively. The 'middle-class family woman' and the 'upper-class active man' personas were the most active in online conversations regarding endemic disease and vaccine-related topics, representing 40% and 19% of comments, respectively. Vaccination rates were 54%-71% across the traveller personas in the online survey. Reasons for vaccination reluctance included perception of low risk to disease exposure (21%), price (14%), fear of side effects (12%) and number of vaccines (11%).ConclusionsThe information collated on German traveller personas and behaviours toward vaccinations should help guide counselling by healthcare professionals.© International Society of Travel Medicine 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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