Tourists Tourism industry COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Pandemic
Taking advantage of tourists’ intensive flow, the SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly spread causing thousands of deaths globally. Trying to contain the already pandemic virus, government travel restrictions were suddenly imposed. Consequently, the tourism industry, which at that moment employed one in ten workers globally, suddenly collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of workers immediately lost their income. Flights were cancelled, and thousands of tourists were stuck abroad with no means to return to their home countries. The gravity of the situation raised the question of whether there was scholarly knowledge that could have helped manage tourism during the current pandemic. To answer this question, a methodical literature review was performed, allowing for up to 900 publications to be analysed. Keywords used were pandemic, tourism, tourist and travel. Based on this process, 63 publications were selected for further analysis. Among these, less than 5% were focused on the tourism side of the problem. As such, this research concludes that, by the time the novel coronavirus emerged, there was, virtually, no scholarly knowledge on how to manage tourism during pandemic times so as to avoid chaos, and that the scholarly community studying related issues is very small. Moving forward, this article recommends that research funding agencies and universities encourage the sound development of this area of knowledge. Aspects that should be investigated include when, how and by whom should tourism be halted, as well as the feasibility of a Tourism World Fund for supporting related costs.
Details
Title
How to better manage tourism on pandemic-times? Moving forward on a discussion we should have had before the 2020 crisis
Authors
Laura Sinay (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Social Sciences - Legacy
Maria Cristina Fogliatti de Sinay (Author)
Publication details
Preprints
Publisher
MDPI AG
Date published
2020
DOI
10.20944/preprints202010.0487.v1
ISSN
2310-287X
Copyright note
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Organisation Unit
School of Social Sciences - Legacy; University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; Sustainability Research Cluster