Social costs of tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is currently spreading across the world at an alarming rate, resulting in the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Amidst this crisis, tourism scholars are directing their attention to communities at tourist destinations, looking at their safety and well-being and the costs that they will bear due to the cessation of tourism activity. This article describes residents' perceptions of the risks posed by tourism activity, and estimates their willingness to pay to reduce public health risks based on hypothetical scenarios, using the triple-bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation method. The social costs in three urban destinations are assessed and compared. Based on the findings, suggestions are made for appropriate post-pandemic recovery actions by local authorities and tourism organizations.     

The effect of COVID-19 pandemic on domestic tourism: A DEMATEL method analysis on quarantine decisions

Countries' most effective methods to reduce the impact of outbreaks are quarantine the regions during the pandemic periods. Quarantine decisions during a pandemic directly affect the hospitality industry. There is no universal guideline regarding the quarantine decision during a pandemic. There is a gap in the literature on making the right quarantine decisions to decrease the negative effect of a pandemic on the hospitality industry. To fill this gap, this study uses a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method to help countries for quarantine decisions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the critical hospitality industry indicators is the inter-regional travel flow between regions for local tourism. Data from the household domestic tourism survey obtained from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) is used to acquire the number of people entering and exiting among regions. This study's findings indicate that Istanbul has an essential impact on Turkey's rest. The results also demonstrate that the DEMATEL method provides convenient solutions for quarantine decisions during a pandemic. The DEMATEL application results concerning the COVID-19 pandemic effect might shed light on the hospitality industry’s prospects and challenges. This study's findings might be adopted to prepare the hospitality industry for the COVID-19 pandemic and similar pandemic.     

Hospitality and tourism industry amid COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives on challenges and learnings from India

COVID-19 outbreak has presented unprecedented circumstances before the fragile tourism and hospitality industry. The highly infectious novel coronavirus continues to thwart the sector and raises serious questions about the present and future survival of the sector. The research addresses two important concerns, first, pertains to the major challenges that hospitality and tourism industry faces amid current conditions; and second relates to the vital learnings for the industry. The study draws on the interviews with 15 participants in senior positions in hospitality industry, and tourism and hospitality education services. Responses to the interviews were content analysed, which resulted in 27 sub-themes that were further condensed into 4 major themes. The dominant sub-themes that emerged out of the qualitative enquiry included need of multiskilling and professional development of the employees, increased sense of hygiene, sanitation and related SOPs, optimism toward revival of the industry, media roles, and need of better crisis preparedness. Subsequent overarching themes included “Human Resource Management”, “Health and Hygiene”, “Continuity” and “Concerns”. The study critically discusses prominent themes in the light of the existing arguments from the literature and reflects on implications for the decision makers. The major implications of the study are in the form of determined themes adding to the evolving theory on COVID-19 pandemic and tourism & hospitality industry; and managerial recommendations to address host of issues while taking essential learnings stemming from the current circumstances. Limitations and scope of future research are also discussed.     

Impacts of COVID-19 on global tourism industry: A cross-regional comparison

The tourism industry was one of the world's greatest markets; until the world met a pandemic in the 21st century, COVID-19. This study aims to present the reactions of travelers during the pandemic trends outlined by adopting text mining techniques. Between December 30, 2019–March 15, 2020, approximately 75,000 comments are retrieved from the TripAdvisor forums, and 23,515 cases from the US, Europe, and Asia forums are employed for analyses.The results reveal that the tourism sector is easily affected by global crises. It is almost the same day that travelers decide to cancel or delay their trips, with the spread of the news. More in-depth analyses uncovered several topics consisted of comments on benefiting from travel insurance and refund due to the travel cancellations. Travel insurance has become a hot topic, which may be a way of reanimating the industry by offering travel packages, including travel insurance services.     

CEO letters: Hospitality corporate narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic

For hospitality organizations, the need for compelling corporate narratives is particularly acute in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis due to the scope and severity of its threat to employees, customers, the general public, and the fundamental survival of the company itself. Thus, this study aims to identify corporate narrative strategies and examine how hospitality companies deploy such narrative strategies with impression management tactics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anchored in the Aristotelian concept of persuasive rhetoric and impression management theory, this study content-analyzed 57 CEO letters published by hospitality companies during the COVID-19 outbreak and found the prevalent rhetoric appeals and patterns of rhetoric appeals with impression management tactics embedded in the letters.     

The spatial and temporal resilience of the tourism and outdoor recreation industries in the United States throughout the COVID-19 pandemic

Accurately quantifying industry resilience is essential to devising effective recovery strategies. Previous research into industry resilience has either quantified the concept with single metrics aggregated across large geographies (e.g., visitation) or used metrics comparing the relative concentration of an industry within a region to the national average (e.g., location quotients). The former set of metrics prohibits spatially targeted recovery efforts while the latter fails during national crises. We propose the measurement of tourism and outdoor recreation industry resilience to COVID-19 based on growth rates in employment, wages, and establishments using publicly accessible time-series data on all counties in the United States. We use these indicators to characterize the spatio-temporal patterns of industry resilience across the country. The indicators can serve as a useful reference for diagnosing and monitoring industry resilience as well as developing targeted policies, programs, and promotion efforts that facilitate more localized response efforts.     

COVID-19 and Africa's aviation and tourism sectors: A new agenda for the future?

Although the impact of COVID-19 is inordinately enormous, there remains a lack of attention to the new governance architecture, the African Union High-Level Task Force (AU-HLTF), in Africa's aviation and tourism sectors in its wake, which this paper primarily examines. We foregrounded governance themes of political economy within the African Union High-Level Task Force (AU-HLTF) through secondary data, observing 90 key industry leaders and 10 purposively sampled semi-structured interviews. We found the insignificant priority in tourism restart via LCCs first, the incongruent holistic relationship between the restart of the aviation and tourism sectors. Secondly, the historical-geographical material relationships within the new governance framework. Thirdly, the AU-HLTF intervention is actor-biased towards the aviation sector and rooted in path dependency. A hierarchical-mixed market governing typology we propose by arguing is a steering mechanism of public sector reform that alternatively reboots a balanced path towards sustainability by prioritizing intra-tourism promoted by low-cost carriers.     

Accommodation decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic: Complexity insights from Greece

With the remaining ambiguity around COVID-19 effective treatment, the decision-making process for 2020 tourists remains fraught with complexity. Drawing from a sample of 385 permanent Athenian residents, the study explores the decision-making attributes driving their accommodation purchasing preferences in times of increased uncertainty. The complex dynamics are investigated using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. A complementary analysis evaluates the size effect of the examined conditions using Necessary Condition Analysis. In total, four solutions are generated concerning: (i) health and safety; (ii) the price-quality nexus; (iii) risk aspects; and (iv) quality related health and safety. The study contributes towards the initiation of the theoretical discourse on the foundations of the exploration of tourists’ accommodation choice triggers and dilemmas in times of pandemics. The results inform market intelligence with regard to accommodation-related customer priorities, perceptions and intentions during the pandemic which lay several important managerial implications for the accommodation industry.     

Applying the TRIRISK model to COVID-19 in tourism: A comparison between 2020 and 2021

In this study, we adapted a TRIRISK model developed in the medical field for deployment in the tourism domain. Structural equation modeling was used to investigate the roles of the deliberative, affective, and experiential dimensions of perceived risk and the perceived severity of COVID-19 in predicting travel avoidance intentions. An analysis of covariance was conducted to determine whether the study variables differ by period and demographic factors. The study makes three major contributions to the literature, namely, the development of an instrument to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel avoidance intentions; the testing of models that identified the relationships between the perceived risk of contracting the virus, expected severity of the medical and psychosocial consequences emanating from this risk, and travel avoidance intentions; and an evaluation of the initial appraisal of differences among sociodemographic cohorts in response to the study variables for 2020 and 2021.     

A review of early COVID-19 research in tourism: Launching the Annals of Tourism Research's Curated Collection on coronavirus and tourism

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unparalleled impacts to the global tourism industry, thus inspiring a wave of academic research. This paper presents a review of the early literature on COVID-19 and tourism, representing 249 papers. The analysis revealed five key themes: (1) psychological effects and behavior; (2) responses, strategies, and resilience; (3) sustainable futures; (4) impact monitoring, valuation, and forecasting; and (5) technology adoption. However, this research also raises questions about theoretical contribution, methodologies, and future research potential. This article also launches the Annals of Tourism Research's Curated Collection on coronavirus and tourism. The Collection contains all past articles published in Annals of Tourism Research on the topic and will continue to grow as new articles are added.     

Travel burnout: Exploring the return journeys of pilgrim-tourists amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

This study investigates the timely, yet academically unexplored, topic of travel burnout. The study explores the return journeys of pilgrim-tourists from Iran to Pakistan during COVID-19 pandemic and contextualizes travel burnout as a negative emotional state placed in the existing theoretical streams. The conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989; 2004) provided theoretical support to guide current study's research agenda. On the basis of a qualitative grounded theory research design, 47 in-depth interviews of pilgrim-tourists were conducted. Travel burnout emerged as a multidimensional concept comprising 3 core dimensions, i.e., low tourist self-efficacy, travel exhaustion and emotional maladaptation. Travel burnout anchors emerged as those factors that facilitated preservation of the tourists' resources when travel circumstances became beyond their regulation. The results pave the way for a more theoretically sound conceptualization of travel burnout. For destination marketing organizations, various avenues are identified that need attention to alleviate the tourist concerns that lead to burnout.     

COVID-19 and the aviation industry: The interrelationship between the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the frequency of flights on the EU market

This study aims to investigate the contribution of aviation related travel restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 in Europe by using quasi-experiment approaches including the regression discontinuity design and a two-stage spatial Durbin model with an instrumental variable. The study provides concrete evidence that the severe curtailing of flights had a spontaneous impact in controlling the spread of COVID-19. The counterfactual analysis encapsulated the spillover effects deduced that a 1% decrease in flight frequency can decrease the number of confirmed cases by 0.908%. The study also reveals that during the lockdown, the aviation industry cancelled over 795,000 flights, which resulted in averting an additional six million people being from being infected and saving 101,309 lives.     

Mental health rescue effects of women's outdoor tourism: A role in COVID-19 recovery

Mental and social health outcomes from a portfolio of women's outdoor tourism products, with ~100,000 clients, are analysed using a catalysed netnography of >1000 social media posts. Entirely novel outcomes include: psychological rescue; recognition of a previously missing life component, and flow-on effects to family members. Outcomes reported previously for extreme sports, but not previously for hiking in nature, include psychological transformation. Outcomes also identified previously include: happiness, gratitude, relaxation, clarity and insights, nature appreciation, challenge and capability, and companionship and community effects. Commercial outdoor tourism enterprises can contribute powerfully to the wellbeing of women and families. This will be especially valuable for mental health recovery, following deterioration during COVID-19 coronavirus lockdowns worldwide.     

The good,the bad and the ugly on COVID-19 tourism recovery

This paper is to produce different scenarios in forecasts for international tourism demand, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. By implementing two distinct methodologies (the Long Short Term Memory neural network and the Generalized Additive Model), based on recent crises, we are able to calculate the expected drop in the international tourist arrivals for the next 12 months. We use a rolling-window testing strategy to calculate accuracy metrics and show that even though all models have comparable accuracy, the forecasts produced vary significantly according to the training data set, a finding that should be alarming to researchers. Our results indicate that the drop in tourist arrivals can range between 30.8% and 76.3% and will persist at least until June 2021.     

The COVID-19 pandemic and organisational commitment of senior hotel managers

The COVID-19 pandemic will reduce the attractiveness of hospitality occupations. This particularly concerns senior management positions whose holders may substitute hospitality jobs with more secure and rewarding employment in other economic sectors. Organisational resilience of hospitality businesses, including their response to COVID-19, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices may, however, affect perceived job security of senior managers and, thus, influence their commitment to remain in their host organisations. This paper quantitatively tests the inter-linkages between the above variables on a sample of senior managers in hotels in Spain. It finds that the levels of organisational resilience and the extent of CSR practices reinforce perceived job security of managers which, in turn, determines their organisational commitment. Organisational response to COVID-19 affects perceived job security and enhances managers’ organisational commitment. To retain senior management teams in light of future disastrous events, hotels should, therefore, strengthen their organisational resilience and invest in CSR.     

Independent restaurant operator perspectives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic

The purpose of this study was to assess the perceptions and attitudes of South Carolina independent full-service restaurant operators in relation to the operational and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study utilized a mixed-methods approach that first partnered with local administrative and governmental bodies to disseminate a short survey. The survey was open to respondents for a 5-week period, beginning May 4th, 2020, which was when restaurants were permitted to reopen indoor dining, but with seating capacity restrictions to ensure social distancing. The second qualitative stage employed semi-structured post-survey interviews with selected independent restaurant operators from across the state. The results indicated that 25% of the restaurants polled did not survive the nearly two-month closure. Less than a quarter of respondents were unable to bring back their company’s employees to pre-pandemic levels. The CARES Act financial relief programs were favored by most (81%) of the surveyed restaurant operators. Approximately 65% of the respondents did not feel they could keep their restaurants open if the pandemic restrictions remained in place until 2021. The respondents were split as to the future viability of the hospitality and tourism industry. The study offers guidance and managerial strategies for other independent full-service restaurant operators, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve.