Tourism in the Low Touch Economy: Challenges and Opportunities

Introduction

The tourism industry has been severely affected in different moments and has had to adapt to the emerging demands. (López-Palacios, 2020). Between 2000 and 2015, major disruptive events included the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the economic crisis in 2008/2009, and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Gossling, Scott & Hall, 2020). In 2001, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the whole industry changed its focus towards security; the experience of flying changed completely. Passengers needed to arrive at least two hours earlier to go through the added securities and be able to board on time, carry-on luggage became limited, especially in terms of its contents, travel restrictions were enforced, and visa issuing procedures became stricter (López-Palacios, 2020).

Tourism is one of the most critical industries in several countries. The sector is worth around 9 trillion USD, which is three times larger than agriculture (Constantin, Saxon & Yu, 2020). According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), in 2019, there were 1.4 billion tourists traveling throughout the globe, which contributed 1.7 trillion USD to the global GDP.

In the last decade, tourism had an annual growth of 2.4% (Nexotur, 2021). In 2018, this industry’s contribution to the global GDP amounted to 10.4%, the equivalent to 8.8 billion dollars, and generated jobs for 319 million people in the world (WTTC, 2019). During 2019, the travel and tourism sector was responsible for one in ten jobs (330 million in total), generated one in four new jobs, and was responsible for 10.3% of the world’s GDP. In this sense, tourism has a great social impact, as it contributes decisively to the development of communities and is also a very inclusive industry in terms of gender; in 2019, more than 50% of the workforce in global tourism were women (WTTC, 2020).

Nevertheless, in 2020 things started to change. To face the health crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) urged governments around the world to address the issue with a set of drastic measures, which included national and international travel restrictions, closure of workplaces and schools, social distancing, quarantines, and confinement, among others (WHO, 2020).

International, regional, and local travel restrictions immediately affected national economies, which include the tourism and hospitality systems comprised of segments such as air transport, cruises, public transport, accommodation, cafes and restaurants, conventions, festivals, meetings, and sporting events, among others (Gossling et al., 2020). The tourism industry is currently experiencing unprecedented health, social, and economic crises where around 121 million jobs have been lost worldwide, and the figure may rise to 197 million if international travel restrictions continue (WTTC, 2020).

In the first ten months of 2020, the pandemic cost the travel industry 935 billion USD in revenue worldwide (Madden, 2021). The ten countries whose tourism was most affected are presented in Table 1.

Source: Official esta, in madden, 2021