Destination Resilience Research Articles

Destination Resilience and Sustainable Tourism Development

Measuring the resilience of a dynamic system is a difficult undertaking. This article is an effort to present intersecting theories between destination resilience and sustainable tourism. Traditional tourism management relies on a narrow focus based in scientific approaches that are often linear in concept. This type of thinking may lead to some limitations in planning and a full understanding of how the tourism industry operates on various scales. Resilience describes the capacity of a system to absorb change and continue to persist. Sustainability is the intersection of social, economic, institutional, and ecological variables. In this article, a heuristic model is presented that combines and adapts Butler's Tourism Area Life Cycle and Holling's Adaptive Cycle. This heuristic model is intended to stimulate theories on destination resilience within the context of sustainable tourism.

Destination Resilience and Smart Tourism Destinations

Destinations around the world are rolling out smart tourism initiatives to increase their competitiveness and to support their sustainability goals. However, whether smart tourism development can also help them build resilience is a question that currently lacks an answer. This article links the two concepts of smart destinations and destination resilience at the conceptual level and presents a five-pillar framework of smart destination resilience. Specifically, it suggests smart tourism infrastructure and governance equip smart destinations with sensing, opening, sharing, governing, and innovating capacities that can enhance destination resilience by supporting six specific resilience conditions. As such, the article provides the necessary theoretical building blocks to support empirical research at the intersection of smart tourism and destination resilience. It further provides practical insights on how to ensure that smart destination development leads to greater resilience but also warns of the need to scope out potential vulnerabilities inherent in smart destination design.

Thailand's Approach to Destination Resilience: An Historical Perspective of Tourism Resilience From 2002 to 2018

Thailand's inbound tourism industry has grown significantly during the early part of the 21st century. By the end of 2017, Thailand attracted the highest level of international tourist visitation of the 10-nation Association of South East Nations (ASEAN) with 35.38 million international visitors. By 2017, it was the ninth most visited country in the world and ranked second only to China as the most visited national destination in Asia. A key characteristic of Thailand's government destination management and marketing organization [Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT)] and the private sector of Thailand's tourism industry has been a remarkable capacity for destination resilience. This article focuses on the resilience of Thailand as a destination between 2002 and 2018 through the theoretical prism of organizational resilience and the destination sustainability framework. During this period, Thailand's tourism industry overcame a range of potentially damaging crises and reputational challenges. This article seeks to explain the TAT's commitment to embedding resilience into its strategic planning. TAT's extensive implementation of effective risk and crisis management best practices has enabled Thailand's tourism market to recover rapidly from a range of challenges. TAT's commitment to resilience is enhanced by its extensive cooperation with both its private sector stakeholders and the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), which is headquartered in Bangkok. The Thai tourism industry's commitment to risk and crisis management reflects the importance of tourism to Thailand's national reputation, image, and economy. TAT's close relationship with PATA and ASEAN Tourism, two transnational tourism associations with a strong commitment to destination resilience, has helped to benchmark Thailand's qualitative approach to tourism resilience. TAT demonstrates a clear appreciation that rapid recovery from crisis events and effective contingency management practice require a high level of collaboration with key stakeholders. Numerous private sector stakeholders with a vested interest in the success of Thai tourism represent all sectors of the tourism industry. They have readily contributed their resources and support to Thailand's marketing campaigns.

Conceptualizing Destination Resilience From a Multilevel Perspective

The concept of resilience has gained momentum in current tourism research, yet there are still flaws and discrepancies between the many notions applied in the field. These limitations are further evident when we focus on tourist destinations. The aim of this article is to advance the conceptualization of destination resilience through a multilevel perspective (MLP) that frames landscape, regime, niche, and actors as integrated elements of the tourism system. The resulting framework encompasses ecological, socioecological, sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociotechnological dimensions reflecting the embeddedness of resilience among heterogeneous and potentially complementary destination stakeholders. It is argued that the use of the MLP advances the understanding of tourism destination planning, particularly in contexts coping with gradual as well as drastic changes due to both demand fluctuations and supply-side disturbances.

Mental Wellness in Resilient Destinations

ABSTRACTNew shifts in medicine make Mental Wellness a trend-topic for product development. An important aspect of product design is the image projected of the destination of travel for Mental Wellness and its focus on resilience. The concept of resilience can be extended across many areas, providing grounds for a methodological approach that coheres with the concepts of Mental Wellness and Destination Resilience. It is implemented within a Convergent Development model of Mental Wellness within Resilient Destinations. This model is applied to elaborate new Mental Wellness products, which contribute to the destination resilience. Directly derivable products can be implemented in rural areas, thus leading rural stakeholders to a marketable supply quality. The product approach comprises self-sufficiency measures and social interactions within a fulfilling Mental Wellness paradigm. The integrative framework for multi-level Mental Wellness products is elaborated to sustainably incorporate the natural habitat and indigenous knowledge of the destination, in order to interpret recreational resources authentically, ensure an environmentally oriented identity, and initiate co-operative approaches between stakeholders. The prototype of Mental Wellness products and potential design solutions are proposed for experimental destinations in Belarus, thus justifying the contribution that these products can make to the economic growth of transitive and developing regions.

Chinese Tourist Mobilities and Destination Resilience: Regional Tourism Perspectives

Chinese Tourist Mobilities and Destination Resilience: Regional Tourism Perspectives

Sustainable Tourism in Sensitive Environments: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?

Sustainable tourism has become a widely adopted term that has allowed many tourism developments to take place under its rubric that are less than sustainable and have been located in sensitive areas that have not all been suitable for such development. The paper reviews the origin and shortcomings of the concept and some of the implications of the resulting problems. It argues for a more critical review of so-called sustainable forms of tourism and for a focus to shift towards increasing the resilience of destinations, particularly those in sensitive areas, in order to shield them from the effects of inappropriate or excessive tourism development.

Symbiotic relationship or not? Understanding resilience and crisis management in tourism

This opinion piece argues the need for researchers to shift to resilience rather than crisis management research in tourism studies. While the two concepts are inherently linked, existing studies prioritize the latter rather than the former. Also, a strong focus on disasters as the backdrop for resilience research in tourism is highlighted. I argue that both fast and slow paced changes that impact the tourism system and conceptual issues with respect to concepts such as destination resilience must be studied. I highlight several gaps in the tourism literature on resilience and offer avenues for further research. Specifically, the need for research on destination resilience, psychological resilience, employee resilience and organizational resilience is emphasized.

Building small destination resilience to the impact of bushfire: A case study

Abstract This article draws on the findings of a recent study undertaken to investigate the impact of bushfire on the tourism economy of Harrietville, a small town in North East Victoria, Australia. The study had a particular focus on the impact of the ‘Harrietville Fire’ that burnt for 55 days in early 2013. While the fire did not actually cause a loss of lives or property within Harrietville, road access to the town was closed for effectively three months of 2013 due to both the fire and post-fire flooding. Informed by a visitor survey and in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders, the Destination Sustainability Framework (DSF) was applied to reveal adaptations necessary for the town to minimise the economic effects of future fire events. The need for tourism planning and improved stakeholder communications emerged as key priorities. This article illustrates the application of the DSF in one small destination, explores the value of the framework in terms of bringing community perspectives on risk and recovery to the foreground, and provides insights that might be applied to similar small destinations in Australia reliant on nature-based attractions to underpin the tourism economy.

Resilience to climate change in a cross-scale tourism governance context: a combined quantitative-qualitative network analysis

Luthe, T., and R. Wyss. 2016. Resilience to climate change in a cross-scale tourism governance context: a combined quantitative-qualitative network analysis. Ecology and Society 21(1):27.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08234-210127

From vulnerability to transformation: a framework for assessing the vulnerability and resilience of tourism destinations

Tourism is a key driver of global socio-economic progress. However, its sustainability is at risk from multiple shocks and hazards that threaten livelihoods. Surprisingly little is known about the complex drivers of destination vulnerability, leading to the creation and application of ineffective resilience-building solutions. The paper presents the Destination Sustainability Framework (DSF) designed to assess destination vulnerability and resilience, and support successful resilience-building initiatives. Holistic in nature, the DSF comprises: (1) the shock(s) or stressor(s); (2) the interconnected dimensions of vulnerability – exposure, sensitivity, and system adaptiveness; (3) the dynamic feedback loops that express the multiple outcomes of actions taken (or not); (4) the contextualised root causes that shape destinations and their characteristics; (5) the various spatial scales; and (6) multiple timeframes within which social-ecological change occurs. This innovative framework is significant because it's the first framework to chart the complex manifestation of vulnerability and resilience in tourism destinations. Further, it brings tourism sustainability research in line with wider debates on achieving sustainability within the dynamic coupled human–environment system, doing so through the inclusion of insights from contemporary systems approaches, including chaos–complexity theory, vulnerability approaches, sustainability science, resilience thinking, along with the geographies of scale, place and time.

CRISIS KNOWLEDGE IN TOURISM: TYPES, FLOWS AND GOVERNANCE

Driven by the rapidly growing number of crises that affect tourism, the study of crisis knowledge management is gaining an increased interest in the tourism field. Effective management of crisis knowledge enhances the resilience of tourism organizations and destinations in crisis situations, strengthens their defense mechanisms, limits potential damages and allows them to bounce back to normalcy faster. This paper uses critical incident interviews with 21 tourism executives in order to identify the types of crisis knowledge they employ in the advent of a crisis and to explore the crisis knowledge management processes and flows within their organizations. Drawing from extant generic literature and the informants’ responses, the paper proposes a framework for the governance of crisis knowledge in tourism.