Risk & Crisis Management in Tourism Sector:
Recovery from Crisis
in the OIC Member Countries
27
External threats: A growing type of threat is terrorism whose roots are external, especially when
this combines with internal unrest.
1.5.3. Health-related Crises
Health-related crises affecting tourism in recent years include Avian flu, Foot and Mouth Disease,
SARS, salmonella, and Ebola. There are two broad categories of health-related crises affecting
tourism: (1) macro-level epidemics affecting people across a wide area, and (2) micro-level
localized illness affecting smaller numbers of tourists.
1. Macro-level epidemics are outbreaks of disease that threaten both the resident population
and visiting tourists, e.g. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), H5N1 and H7N9
(Avian flu), both of which originated in China and affected Asian, Middle East and African
countries, and the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In some cases the outbreak
does not affect tourists directly but impacts on their ability to enjoy their holiday as
planned, such as with the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in the UK in 2001: this will
be discussed in detail in Section 5.2.
2. Micro-level events include illness resulting from poor hygiene or safety by service
providers, e.g. outbreaks of food poisoning such as occurred on the Caledonian Star cruise
ship in 1993 and at the Bahia Principe Hotel in the Dominican Republic in 2007.
For macro-level crises, the destination must prove that steps have been taken to eradicate the
outbreak, or at least control it to the extent that travel to the destination is recognised as being safe
by international health agencies such as the World Health Organization. For micro-level crises,
affected businesses must demonstrate both to their own governments and the international tourist
market that measures have been taken to rectify the failings that caused the outbreak in the first
place. The public sector has a significant role in setting standards such as Food Safety and Hygiene
and ensuring that public-facing enterprises adhere to these.
1.5.4. Technological Events
This category includes crises caused by technological events such as transportation accidents and
the failure of IT systems. These can be cause by malfunctions in the technology or by human
shortcomings in operating the technical systems.
The increased technical reliability of aeroplanes, ships and trains has kept the incidence of accidents
involving these modes of transport to extremely low levels. For instance, over the period 2000-
2009 in the United States, there were 46,901 deaths in road accidents compared to 1,474 deaths in
aviation and maritime accidents combined (Savage, 2013). Despite this discrepancy, air transport
accidents attract far greater media coverage than road accidents. Worldwide, there were 65 fatal
air accidents in the ten-year period 2006-2015, representing a rate of 0.29 per million departures
(Boeing, 2015). However, where flights are the subject of a terrorist attack, such as the 2015
downing of the Metrojet carrying Russian tourists back from the Egyptian Red Sea resorts with the