Risk & Crisis Management in Tourism Sector:
Recovery from Crisis
in the OIC Member Countries
24
Using data from tourism organisations in Canterbury, New Zealand, surveyed 18 months after the
2010 earthquake, Orchiston et al (2015) found that an additional highly rated factor in
organisational resilience was the ability to collaborate with key stakeholders, which allows
businesses to work across organisational boundaries, make collective decisions with other
stakeholders (including competitor businesses), and work effectively with other organisations. A
further finding was that businesses must be able to respond to changes in the tourism landscape.
These factors were also highlighted by Cochrane (2010) in her model of the ‘Sphere of Tourism
Resilience’, which suggested that the three key elements in the capacity of businesses and tourism
systems to recover quickly from crises were strong leadership, an ability to harness market forces,
and good collaborative working.
1.5. Types of Crisis in Tourism
The UNWTO (2011) identifies five types of crisis impacting the tourism sector at national, regional
or local level. These are: (1) environmental crises, including geological, extreme weather, and
human-induced events; (2) societal and political events; (3) health-related crises; (4) technological
incidents or failures; and (5) economic events.
In addition, specific events may affect individual businesses, such as (6) accidents or incidents in
the public realm (e.g. death or injury of individual tourists due to drowning, falls, traffic accidents,
or crime), or (7) accidents or events within an individual business: (e.g. food poisoning, accident on
the premises, a fire in the kitchen or room, hostility between different client groups, in-house
malfunctioning of IT systems, problems with power or water supply).
These aspects will be covered in the next sections, though it is important to recognise that in many
cases there is overlap between the different types. Some environmental crises (for instance floods,
landslides) have anthropogenic origins: for instance the devastating mudslide in the Sierra Leone
capital, Freetown, which killed around 500 people in August 2017, was thought to be due to years
of deforestation in the hills around the capital, and there are obvious linkages between economic
events and societal and political events, in that economic issues such as devaluation and
unemployment can spark societal unrest and political challenges. Nevertheless, it is helpful to have
a form of categorization and the one devised by UNWTO is applied here. It will be referred to
throughout the report.
Examples given in this section are mainly drawn from countries other than those included in the
case studies covered in Sections 4 and 5.
1.5.1. Environmental Crises
Geological: Events in this category include hurricanes and cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic
eruptions, and tsunamis.