Managing Tourist Risk, Grief and Distrust Post COVID-19.

Abstract

Tourism is one of the most important sectors for many countries and is also one of the most vulnerable to the impact of disasters. However, while tourism has proved resilient to localized or regional crisis, COVID-19 has had a universal impact on tourists, with pervasive, profound, and enduring implications. Our main objective is to explore and elucidate how such recent changes to tourism, triggered by the pandemic, affected the future travel intentions of tourists. Our exploration of these issues through in-depth interviews, finds that tourists were emotionally and psychologically affected by the sudden curb to their lives and that these emotions broadly equate to stages of grief. Furthermore, we uncover not only a general reduction in trust, but, concomitantly, an elevation in distrust towards destinations, manifest at the level of government, healthcare and tourist institutions, activities, and risk mitigation practices. Finally, we offer a discussion of the contributions and implications of our study in terms of tourism and hospitality research and practice.