Resilience in Tourism

Tourism is a significant source of income for the population and an important foreign exchange earner for the economies in many countries of the Global South. However, many tourism destinations are confronted with complex and interrelated risks such as climate change, global pandemics, biodiversity loss and ever-increasing challenges in their ecosystems. In order to address increasing uncertainties and ever more frequent crisis events, also in tourism destinations, resilience has become a key concept in dealing with these challenges. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated problems for tourism – offers a starting point for the implementation of long-term concepts to promote a resilient approach to future risks and crises.

Destination resilience consists of the ability of the individual actors of a destination to react to acute crisis events but also to initiate long-term adaptation and transformation strategies. These proactive strategies take into account not only aspects of disaster preparedness, but also aspects of sustainable development. Thus, on the one hand, destination resilience is located on different levels and, on the other hand, it is a multi-layered construct that includes social, economic, institutional and ecological dimensions.

This is where the project ‘Destination Resilience – Quality Infrastructure for Resilient Tourism’ came in. The aim of the project was to develop and apply a holistic resilience concept at destination level, which includes aspects of sustainability as well as disaster risk reduction. Tourism destinations consist of different groups of actors and components (e.g., hotel and hospitality industry, transport sector or leisure industry etc.) and are confronted with different risks – be it a pandemic, the global climate crisis or acute hazard events such as terrorism and natural hazards. Based on three pilot destinations, Namibia (Erongo Region), Sri Lanka (Ella) and the Dominican Republic (Samaná), options for action and training modules were compiled that are specifically based on the local conditions of these three destinations.

Through the project, the awareness and importance of risk and resilience in the tourism sector could be strengthened as well as concrete measures for resilience enhancement and risk-informed development could be successfully implemented in the three destinations. In addition to the added value for the local actors in the destinations, a contribution was also made to increasing the safety of holidaymakers.