Risk and crisis management and business events

Abstract

Unlike many other sectors, tourism and related tourism activities show extremely high levels of vulnerability in terms of crisis. In fact, previous experience has taught that crises with fatal outcomes usually resulted in almost immediate abandonment of previously planned trips by travellers. Business events are no exception to this rule. In current political and environmental turmoil on the global scale, business events may be easily affected by different types of crisis. Thus, considering their high vulnerability, assessing risks and preparation of valid crisis management plans and procedures is of utmost importance for the business events industry. Unfortunately, only a small portion of the literature has been explicitly focused on the risk and crisis management of the business events making this field largely unexplored. This chapter contributes to the existing knowledge by addressing the issues of risk and crisis management focusing on the Convention and Visitor Bureau (CVB) risk and crisis activities from a destination perspective. To illustrate the risk and crisis phenomena within the business event context, a case study of the Barcelona Convention bureau is proposed. The chapter proposes the generalizable risk and crisis management guidelines to CVB, in order to help them to formulate crisis management plans or to enhance already existing ones.