JICA Economic Development Department; Building Resilient Tourism Industry - From readiness for disasters and crisis risks to post-crisis recovery -

Tourism industry and its crisis management

Tourism has grown to become a leading industry in the world economy, accounting for 10.4% of global GDP and 9.9% of employment in 2017. Especially, in developing countries, it has become essential part of people's livelihoods and even their countries.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic that began in late 2019 has exposed inherent vulnerabilities of the tourism industry.

The JICA-Net multimedia-based learning materials "Tourism Crisis Management -Tourism Development Under the New Normal-" (external link) explains 4 phases of tourism crisis management to increase the tourism industry's resilience, which is vulnerable to disasters and crisis risks.

What is Tourism Crisis Management?

The COVID-19 pandemic that began in late 2019 has been making tourism industry significant negative impacts.

A variety of natural disaster risks and human-induced disaster risks occur across the world, making the visitors and tourism businesses significant negative impacts.

Tourism crisis management is organizational activities that includes: anticipating those negative impacts in advance and implementing countermeasures to minimize the damages, rapidly and appropriately responding to the actual crisis, and at the same time, taking measures for reputational damages and supporting the business continuity and early recovery of the affected tourism industry.

The first step of tourism crisis management is "To identify risks". It is very important to identify risks, for example, anticipating beforehand the possibility of where and what kind of crisis could occur and what would occur as the result.

4R of Tourism Crisis Management

The material describes the tourism crisis management that are divided into 4 phases.

Tourism crisis management is not only the crisis response. It includes the whole phases from the readiness and prevention against crisis to post-crisis recovery.

This material describes the essential elements of the tourism crisis management that are divided into 4 phases: "Reduction", "Readiness", "Response", and "Recovery", and explained by the expert with illustrations so that people understand it easily.

[Reduction]

• Mitigate the potential risks.
• Minimize the impact of disaster/crisis events on the tourism sector.

[Readiness]

• Readiness ensures prompt and appropriate response immediately following a crisis event.

[Response]

• Immediately following the onset of a disaster, activate the crisis response team, ensure the safety of guests and employees, and take measures for post-crisis recovery.

[Recovery]

• In order to recover the number of visitors to the previous level before the disaster/crisis event, reconstructing damaged infrastructures for tourism, preparing to receive visitors, planning and performing marketing and promoting activities.

  Those 4R need to be linked with each other and should be planned and implemented together, not individually. It is important to raise the level circulating among 4R through the crisis experiences.

An interest in "Tourism Crisis Management" rises worldwide

JICA has also been collaborating with various organizations to provide support.

In recent years, disaster prevention and crisis risks management in the field of tourism have drawn global attention. Especially, because of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in late 2019, many counties realized the inherent vulnerabilities of the tourism industry and came to have a high interest in tourism crisis management.

We hope that all people, not only concerned with JICA but also the tourism industry in the world watch it, and expect that the material becomes a help to increase the resilience of the tourism industry.

URANO Yoshihito
JICA Economic Development Department

*The Material(s) mainly applied

Tourism Crisis Management -Tourism Development Under the New Normal-

This video highlights the significance and importance of crisis management for tourism industry, which is one of the largest industries in the world.

Tourism has grown to become a leading industry in the world economy, accounting for 10.4% of global GDP and 9.9% of employment in 2017. However, the COVID-19 pandemic that began late 2019 has exposed inherent vulnerabilities of the tourism industry. This video explains 4 phases of Tourism Crisis Management in order to increase resilience of the tourism industry, which is vulnerable to disasters and crisis risks.

• YouTube (external link)