Ensuring travellers' health and well-being is an important issue in tourism management and public health. By applying and testing the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), this study serves as one of the early attempts in tourism to explore travellers' self-protective behavior against health risks. This study conducted semi-structured interviews and an online survey. Consistent with the PMT, this study found that both threat and coping appraisals can enhance travellers' protection motivations, which in turn affect their actual behaviors. This study also provided interpretation of maladaptive perception in a tourism context and found its negative association with coping appraisal. Implications were provided on how to encourage travellers to protect themselves against health risks.