Reflections of Covid- 19 on Tourism Industry (original) (raw)

2021, Transition to New Normal After Covid-19 (Strategies to Turn Crisis into Opportunity)

Introduction: Travel and tourism in the world have become the most important industry in terms of business, socio- cultural and economic development. Many countries or destinations recognize that tourism plays a critical role in the impact of GDP. The tourism industry plays an important role in travel, sightseeing, economic activities and customer satisfaction. The industry is a financial force for the local image of the destination (Abbas et al., 2021). In 2019, tourist mobility globally increased to about 1.5 billion. It is estimated that this number will exceed 1.8 billion by 2030 (Jamal & Budke, 2020). Travel and tourism provide people with the ability to contribute to different societies by offering fun and rich experiences and to make different cultural exchanges from those societies. In the 21st century, there is a rapid spread of products, information, and even diseases, thanks to a wide variety of travel opportunities. For this reason, with travel factors positive events and riskbearing factors can occur. Communities are constantly on the move, including workers, economic migrants, climate migrants, brain drains and tourists. These travel movements can have negative effects as well as providing the growth of tourism (Jamal & Budke, 2020). States and tourism industry stakeholders need to further investigate the international risks and impacts of travel and tourism activities. It is seen that the biggest effects on the tourism industry in the 21st century are shaped around two main factors like climate and pandemic diseases. The tourism industry can be affected not only by pandemics but also by disasters and political events. With the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the global financial crisis of 2008, other diseases and now the COVID- 19 pandemic, tourism activities have come to a near standstill. However, although there is a global pandemic, many evaluations are made on how to eliminate these negative effects. It is among the evaluations that international tourism has the potential to be reborn (Brouder, 2020; Cheer, 2020). Infectious diseases are linked to the economic, scientific and political power of countries. In terms of the country’s economy, it is known that pandemics cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage even in the last 20 years. In the world bank research of the past years, it is seen that the six major pandemics between 1997 and 2009 caused a loss of at least 80 billion USD (McCloskey et al., 2014). Pandemics have many harmful effects on societies. However, in parallel, social events also affect pandemics (Nathanson, 2016). These pandemics include Nipah virus, West Nile Fever, SARS, Avian Flu, BSE, and Rift Valley Fever (McCloskey et al., 2014). In particular, the 2019 Coronavirus (COVID- 19) pandemic is causing a lot of financial damage to countries. COVID- 19 has caused negative transitions in the gold, stock and cryptocurrency markets (Bai et al., 2021). Considering the losses caused by these diseases in the past; SARS has seriously affected Hong Kong’s tourism industry. Swine flu only affected certain places. South Korea has lost 2.1 million tourists from this outbreak. Since MERS started in the Middle East, it has affected the tourism industry of the countries there. Also, Ebola is known to damage the tourism image of many countries in Africa (Wassler & Fan, 2021). COVID- 19, on the other hand, caused significant losses in the Hong Kong tourism industry (Şengel et al., 2020). Travel restrictions and overseas travel bans have been introduced. Travel restrictions and overseas travel bans have been introduced. The Hong Kong tourism industry was adversely affected by the social events in July 2019 before the pandemic, and there was an 80.9 % decrease in tourist arrivals with COVID- 19 (Zhang et al., 2021). Again, the tourism industries of Russia, Thailand, Japan, Italy, France, USA, China, Turkey, Australia and Saudi Arabia are among the most affected. These countries had to close many restrictions and activities to the outside because of the pandemic (Şengel et al., 2020). As can be seen, infectious diseases have negatively affected many areas in society especially tourism, and still continue to affect them.