Crises and Disasters in Tourism Industry: Happen locally - Affect globally

Abstract

Many scholars have noted an increasing number of disasters and crises, which affect the tourism industry, ranging from natural to human influenced incidents. The globalisation of the tourism industry and the fact that the world is also becoming more interdependent and connected, have led to a new reality for tourism industry, where crises that occur in one single place of the world can affect tourism activities around the broader area or worldwide. This paper, which is based upon the existing literature, tries to support this interdependence of tourism industry and enforces the need for crisis preparedness in tourism involved businesses and stakeholders. For this reason, the paper presents some alternative approaches of crisis context in tourism sector and it uses some well-known cases of crises and disasters, which had significant impacts on the tourism industry, in order finally to underline the constantly ascending need for crisis and disaster preparation for tourist businesses.