According to a study by the European Travel Commission (ETC), the current situation creates the right conditions for tourism crises to grow and become unmanageable. There is a noticeable difference between a crisis and an unexpected event.
In 2022, the World Health Organisation stated that ‘the European Region is in a “permacrisis”1 . The frequency of different crisis situations in Europe has been increasing in recent years, including those linked to climate change, emerging infectious diseases, and war. The fact that tourism demand has recovered relatively swiftly in the wake of the pandemic may suggest that demand is fairly resilient. Yet it does not necessarily demonstrate that the supply side of Europe’s tourism sector – its destinations, its communities and local businesses – has become more resilient to withstand future crises, which are becoming bigger and more complex in nature.
Yet while the National Tourism Organisations (NTOs) that contributed insights for this report agree that there is a critical role for their organisations to play in responding to crises, they also recognise that too often, the process of planning for this response and the recovery actions that will follow is left to one side for another day.
The forecast suggests that future crises will be larger and more unpredictable in nature, posing greater strategic and operational challenges for the NTOs. These include a number of prerequisites:
- Crises are occurring on a larger scale than ever before. For example, in 2023, Europe witnessed ‘the largest wildfire ever recorded, one of the wettest years, severe marine heat waves and widespread devastating flooding
- The era of ‘always on’ communications and live streaming on social media means that news of an incident is more frequently being broadcast while an incident unfolds from multiple points of view, meaning that ‘official’ channels are under instant pressure to catch up with the narrative,rather than control it.
- Misinformation, disinformation and the malicious use of artificial intelligence (AI) are already testing the public’s ability to tell which stories, videos and images are real and which are not.
- When the sustainability of tourism itself is being questioned, the blame for incidents may turn residents against visitors. As awareness grows among the public about the negative impacts tourism can have on communities and the environment, this provides a febrile environment when crises hit, with the activities of visitors and tourism businesses coming under the spotlight more frequently.
The potential effects of crisis events on international tourism are likely to expand in both size and frequency as tourism becomes increasingly hypermobile and the global economy even more interconnected.
The difference between a ‘crisis’ and an ‘incident’
In a highly global, interconnected sector such as tourism, there is a high potential for external factors (such as the weather, geopolitical events, technology failure or human error) to disrupt the normal flow of business activity, as well as the visitor experience. For example, the closure of a major hub airport for just 24 hours can have repercussions for many days afterwards and cause travellers and businesses to incur millions of euros in unforeseen costs.
Αccording to the World Economic Forum’s classification of crises, situations such as labour force decline, large-scale migration and public health (pandemics and epidemics) are also considered (socio-economic) crises. While the lack of skilled labour has certainly affected many European destinations (especially after the Covid-19 pandemic). Similarly, large-scale migration caused by people fleeing wars and conflicts has not had a significant impact on European tourism.
