Crisis and Disaster Management for Tourism (Aspects of Tourism) - Softcover

Ritchie, Brent W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845411056 ISBN 13: 9781845411053

Verlag: Channel View Publications, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Tourism destinations and businesses are becoming increasingly prone to the impacts of crises and disasters due to global environmental change and security risks. This is the first research based book that provides a strategic approach to understanding the nature of tourism crises and disasters before outlining tourism crisis and disaster planning, response, and longer term recovery and knowledge management strategies. It applies a wide range of theoretical perspectives and concepts to improve our understanding of both organisational crises and natural disasters. The book draws on examples from around the world including the USA, Europe, UK, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. It will be essential reading for tourism academics and students as well as tourism managers and government officials involved in tourism destination management and marketing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr Ritchie is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Tourism at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research interests have focused on city and capital tourism, visitor behaviour and tourism marketing. He has also published extensively in the area of tourism crisis and disaster planning, management and recovery, in journals such as Tourism Management, the Journal of Travel and Tourism Marketing and Current Issues in Tourism. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management and on the editorial board of four tourism journals including Tourism Recreation Research.

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Crisis and Disaster

Management for Tourism

By Brent W. Ritchie

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2009 Brent W. Ritchie
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84541-105-3

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements, 
Part 1: Setting the Context for Tourism Crisis and Disaster Management, 
1 Introduction to Tourism Crisis and Disaster Management, 
2 Classifying and Understanding Crises and Disasters, 
3 Strategic Crisis and Disaster Planning and Management, 
Part 2: Tourism Crisis and Disaster Prevention and Planning, 
4 Tourism Crisis Prevention and Disaster Mitigation, 
5 Tourism Disaster and Crisis Preparedness and Planning, 
Part 3: Tourism Crisis and Disaster Response, Implementation and Management, 
6 Coordination, Control and Resource Allocation, 
7 Crisis and Disaster Communication and Recovery Marketing, 
Part 4: Tourism Crisis and Disaster Recovery, Resolution and Feedback, 
8 Long-term Recovery and Resoltion, 
9 Knowledge Management and Organisational Learning, 
10 Conclusion and Reflections on Tourism Crisis and Disaster Management, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Tourism Crisis and Disaster Management

International tourism flows are subject to disruption by a range of events that may occur in the destination itself, in competing destinations, origin markets, or they may be remote from either. The consequences may be either mild and relatively short term or have catastrophic impacts on existing industry systems. Major disruptions, also referred to as shocks, are felt in both origin and destination areas, affect both the public and private sectors and disrupt the travel plans of intending travellers.

Prideaux et al. (2003: 475)

Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to crisis and disaster management for the tourism industry. First, it defines tourism and the tourism industry and acknowledges tourism from a systems perspective. It notes the main characteristics that make tourism unique but also susceptible to change as a result of shocks, crises and disasters. The chapter suggests that decision-making of consumers can be vastly impacted by crises or disasters impacting upon business and society. Second, the chapter notes a move from crisis and disaster management to prevention and planning, suggesting a growing awareness of the impact of disasters and crises on society.

It advocates that far from ignoring crises and disasters and viewing them simply as a threat, tourism managers and destinations should embrace them as a part of the tourism system and should strategically plan for such events by identifying and understanding crises and disasters, developing and implementing management plans, and evaluating the success of those plans for more effective planning and adaptive management systems. The chapter concludes with an overview of the two main fields of theory and literature: organisational crisis management, and disaster and emergency management. It also provides a brief overview of key tourism literature and concludes with an outline of the book structure.

Crisis and Disaster Definitions

A number of authors have attempted to understand crises and disasters by first defining them. According to Keown-McMullan (1997: 8), a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a crisis has not yet been developed and it is unlikely to emerge in the near future. Pauchant and Mitroff (1992: 15) believe that a crisis is a 'disruption that physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, its existential core'. Selbst (1978 in Faulkner, 2001: 136) defines a crisis as 'any action or failure to act that interferes with an organisation's ongoing functions, the acceptable attainment of its objectives, its viability or survival, or that has a detrimental personal effect as perceived by the majority of its employees, clients or constituents'. Selbst's focus on perceptions implies that if an organisation's public or stakeholders perceive a crisis, a real crisis could evolve from this misconception, illustrating that perception management is an important consideration in managing crises. Other definitions of crises are displayed in Table 1.1. Santana (2003) suggests that the definition of the term 'crisis' is problematic due to the construct itself, its application by different fields and its use jointly in the literature with terms such as disaster, catastrophe, jolt, problem and turning point. However, Laws and Prideaux (2005) make a useful point that agreement on a consistent typology for the terms describing tourism crises will help facilitate a dialogue with other researchers in the crisis management field, vital to advancing knowledge and understanding.

Common characteristics of crises tend to be that they are internal and thus the organisation has some power or influence over a crisis. Another common theme expressed in the definitions is that the scale of damage appears to be a key differentiating factor. If an incident or event can or does impact upon the survival, viability or foundation of an organisation, then it may be considered a crisis. The urgency and speed of dealing with an incident is also a key point in many of the definitions and suggests that crises may be surprises, which is why a proactive approach to crisis planning and management is important. For instance, Keown-McMullan (1997) notes that speed of a crisis developing and the speed of response is critical for managers. Nevertheless, as Santana (2003) suggests, crises are emotional situations, putting pressure on managers ensuring quality decisions are difficult to make and implement. Another theme is that a crisis is often a turning point for an organisation, which can have both positive or negative impacts and transformations for businesses and communities. This point is discussed throughout the book and especially in Part 4 of the book, which explores the transformation of organisations and destinations at the resolution stage of a crisis or disaster (Chapter 8), and the role of knowledge management and organisational learning in improving future crisis and disaster plans and reducing the chances of an incident occurring through development of future prevention and mitigation strategies, and adaptive management (Chapter 9).

Many of the features attributed to crises are equally applicable to disasters (Faulkner, 2001), and so confusion between their distinctions can occur with common overlaps between the two, where a crisis may occur as a direct result of a disaster. Kim and Lee (1998) in their paper use the two terms together, while Hills (1998) suggests that the boundary between natural and human-induced behaviour has blurred. Faulkner (2001) considers the principal distinction between what can be termed a 'crisis' and a 'disaster' to be the extent to which the situation is attributable to the organisation itself, or can be described as originating from outside the organisation. Thus, a 'crisis' describes a situation 'where the root cause of an event is, to some extent, self-inflicted through such problems as inept management structures and practices or a failure to adapt to change', while a disaster can be defined as 'where an enterprise (or collection of enterprises in the case of a tourist destination) is confronted with sudden unpredictable catastrophic changes over which it has little control' (Faulkner, 2001: 136). Here, Faulkner (2001) suggests that crises are able, to some degree, to be controlled and within the influence...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Channel View Publications
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1845411056
• ISBN 13: 9781845411053
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland