Global Risks And Crises Management In Tourism

1 Introduction

In tourism behavior, visitors travel with a variety of motivators (psychical, emotional, personal, cultural, personal development, and status) which trigger the economic aspect of the tourism industry (Swarbrooke & Horner, 2007: 54). However, these motivators cannot guarantee ever-growing international tourist arrivals and correspondingly stable growth of tourism supply. Hence, tourism demand requires not only the existence of disposable income but also appropriate conditions such as political stability, comfortable and safe transportation, proper destination management, and high-quality tourism services. Further, visitors in tourism desire to feel themselves in safety and healthy atmosphere. Thus, a chaotic atmosphere or comfortless conditions directly decrease the number of tourist arrivals. Crises in local, national, or global contexts are also a threat risk for tourism arrivals due to their reasons and potential results. Therefore, each crisis in the tourism industry, regardless of its size and content, should be taken into account and be managed properly. It is a fact that the tourism industry is very sensitive to crises, especially if there are perceived health and/or security concerns for visitors. Among a variety of different crises, pandemic conditions such as COVID-19 are also directly affect tourism demand, which is the core element for tourism activities. Hence, tourism demand shapes the destinations and tourism supply. Based on this reality, the general effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and its reflections on managerial operations in thermal hotels are discussed in this study. In the study, authors have also aimed to reveal the lessons learned from the COVID-19 for hotel managers.

Crisis management is preparation for low-probability or unexpected events that could threaten an organization’s viability, reputation, or profitability (Pride & Ferrell, 2009: 455). Recently, crisis management has become more significant for tourism enterprises because several infectious diseases threaten the global economy and human lives (Shang, Li, & Zhang, 2021) and dependence on intangible knowledge capital to survive in an unsteady market that frequently witnesses economic turmoil (Paraskevas et al., 2013: 131). As a result, each hotel in the tourism industry develops a variety of managerial tools to prevent crises. ←13 | 14→However, they cannot have a hold on macro crises, while they can prevent micro crises with those efficient tools. COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis for hotels like every enterprise operating in economic markets. In other words, hotels have some barriers to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Even they behave proactively, some global restrictions such as flight bans and shutdowns of hotel operations force hotel managers to develop unprecedented methods and techniques. Hotel managers could turn the COVID-19 pandemic into an opportunity with those methods and techniques and could gain some advantages from this undesired atmosphere. Considering this fact, this study stresses the managerial advantages of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of thermal tourism management with qualitative research.

Due to the transmissions of Covid-19, one of the firstly announced travel restrictions is came from North Korea on January 21, 2020 (Smith & Zhang, 2020). A few days later, nearly all of China’s neighboring countries have restricted travel to and from the Republic of China (O’connor, 2020). The U.S. announced travel restrictions one month later from China’s first warning about the pandemic (Bollyky & Nuzzo, 2020). In Turkey, it has decided that to stop all flights from China as part of coronavirus on February 5, 2020. All the passengers of far ←14 | 15→eastern countries like Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia, were permitted entry to Turkish airports by screening with thermal cameras and considering coronavirus measures (Hürriyet Daily News, 2020). On March 13, 2020, The Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, Turkey announced that flights to nine countries (Germany, France, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, and the Netherlands) were stopped until April 17, 2020 (Keleş, 2020).