Risk & Crisis Management in Tourism Sector:
Recovery from Crisis
in the OIC Member Countries
26
Crime: Where a country has high levels of crime, particularly physical attacks targeted at tourists,
there will understandably be a reluctance to visit. In 2008, South Africa’s tourismminister claimed
that the country’s spiralling crime figures may have deterred more than 22 million tourists from
visiting the country over the previous five years (Starmer-Smith, 2008) and, as will be seen in the
South Africa case study in Section 5.1, the perception of crime is still a significant deterrent to some
visitor markets.
Politically-motivated disturbances: The developments from 2010 across the Middle East and
North Africa caused concern about the safety of tourists and led to tourism businesses in affected
countries either evacuating their clients or providing reassurance to intending visitors in order to
prevent cancellations. Avraham (2016) reports that in Egypt, the industry and government
emphasised that the area of disruption was limited, since the protests were centred in Cairo, while
other parts of the country (including the Red Sea resorts) were unaffected and tourism was
functioning normally.
Extreme examples of politically-motivated disturbance manifested through coups, civil war and
acts of terrorism will generally bring inbound tourism to a virtual halt, since it normally leads to
travel warnings issued by source country governments (although see the example of Sri Lanka,
which experienced a long-running civil war, in Section 5.4). Normal tourism operations can only
recommence with the restoration of stability and lifting of the travel advisories.
Terror attacks mounted by disaffected interests within society are typically targeted at capital and
other major cities and transportation systems in order to achieve maximum disruption. Examples
resulting in multiple fatalities include the London transport bombings in 2005, the Ankara railway
station attacks in October 2015, the St Petersburg metro system bombs in April 2017, and the
bombing at the Manchester Arena in May 2017.
If the targets for terrorist attacks are foreign tourists, the resumption of international tourism will
generally be a lengthy process. In the survey of tourism businesses carried out for this report,
terrorism was cited as the most significant event to impact on tourism in respondents’ countries.
Measures to speed up the process of recovery are discussed in Section 6; see also the Tunisia case
study in Section 4.3.
Human rights abuses: Where significant political repression and human rights abuses are
perpetrated against domestic populations, international tourismwill be negatively affected if there
is widespread media coverage and lobbying against tourism by pressure groups.