Travellers' Resilience to Major Travel Risks of Today: Global Terrorism and Pandemic Disease – Opportunities and Challenges for Small Tourism Businesses

Introduction

Until most recently, wide-spread terrorist attacks in Europe and in the Middle East occupied most of the news media. Today, the headlines are heavy with hourly updates on the spread of corona virus. Just before that, discussions on social media were raising red flags about a potential migration crisis due the unavoidable effects of climate change. This news stream occupied only the last couple of months, with every new post heightening further the perception of risk and uncertainty (Kapuściński and Richards 2016).

The sense of uncertainty and the impression of impending danger set off our evolutionary encoded survival mechanism and trigger instinctive fear reactions (Ledoux 2015). Our survival instinct aims for effectiveness over efficiency – survival at all cost – by inflating our risk perception over the actual level of danger. Consequently, fear reactions are often exaggerated (Thompson et al. 2017) and irrational (Taha et al. 2014), even crude (Murray and Schaller 2016) and aggressive (Wu and Chang 2012). Irrationally inflated risk perception and fear as the foundation of our survival mechanism are essential for our safety. However, if the irrationality in fear left without a conscious check, instinctive fear reactions could cause substantial societal damage. For example, Human Rights Watch (2020) warned about a significant increase of hate crimes world-wide against local Asian residents who are ethnically related the population of China where the COVID-19 pandemic started. Similarly, violent backlash against local Arabs and Muslims were reported following the 9/11 terrorist attacks across the US (Human Rights Watch 2002).

The atmosphere of uncertainty creates an immense damage particularly for the travel and tourism industry, because the central requirement of tourism is safety and stability (Richter and Waugh 1986) or, most precisely, the sense of safety and stability (Williams and Baláž 2015). Risk perception inflated over the actual level of danger was demonstrated to damage destination image (Perpiña et al. 2017) and restrain the willingness to travel (Sarman et al. 2016), in some cases, even cease international travels all together (Floyd et al. 2004).

Resilience approach is argued to have significant explanatory power and suggested as a promising approach for tourism businesses to cope with the atmosphere of uncertainty global challenges create (Luthe and Wyss 2014). Ritchie (2004) also argues that effective disaster management starts with the development of resilience. Yet, research on how to build tourism resilience in the face of complex global challenges is still limited (Innerhofer et al. 2018). Tourism resilience is described as the capacity of the tourism system to absorb disturbance without collapsing and to re-organize itself to maintain structures and functions (Innerhofer et al. 2018), while allowing change, even innovation and development, after the crisis (Hall et al. 2017). Tourism resilience has three dimensions: ecological-environmental, economic-fiscal and social-cultural (Calgaro et al. 2014). The ecological-environmental dimension represents the bio-physical characteristics of a destination, like natural resources and landscape. The economic-fiscal dimension refers to factors, like fiscal imbalances or economic crisis. The social-cultural dimension includes the strengths and weaknesses of the social system, cultural norms and perceptions and attitudes towards tourism and travelling. The dynamic interrelationship between these dimensions and the uncertainties of the global environment shapes tourism resilience (Tyrrell and Johnston 2008). In order to successfully investigate resilience, each dimension should be dully examined (Pechlaner and Volgger 2015). The socio-cultural dimension focusing on the local tourism community and travellers, while an essential building block of tourism resilience, lacks comprehensive research (Tyrrell and Johnston 2008). In particular, travellers’ resilience is still an unexplored field (Prayag 2018), even though the basic marketing principle stands for the tourism industry as well: the success and the very survival of a business depends on its customer (Kotler et al. 2013), in this case, the travellers.

This chapter contributes to the intermittent literature on travellers’ resilience by investigating how resilient global travellers are in the face of current global adversities, and what opportunities and challenges their resilience creates particularly for the small tourism businesses. The study focuses on how global terrorism risk and the threat of infectious diseases (i.e., COVID-19) shape travellers’ resilience. These are the two most recent game-changers of the travel and tourism industry (US Department of State 2020) as well as the two most potent travel risks considered in tourism literature (Karl and Schmude 2017).