Risk & Crisis Management in Tourism Sector:
Recovery from Crisis
in the OIC Member Countries
35
3. Personal risk assessment, with posts evaluating the risk that the tourist would be willing to
take, stressing the need to purchase comprehensive travel insurance, and the financial risk
perception, with the tone being mostly negative or cynical.
The ASEAN TourismCrisis Communications Manual (2015) uses similar insights to provide advice
to crisis-hit destinations. It identifies ‘triggers’ that generate media interest, applying equally to
traditional or social media. These can be used to understand and shape both the media and public
response to a crisis or disaster and also as a means of enlisting the media post-crisis to report on
and support the recovery process. The principal media triggers are:
 The numbers of people: most attention is given to events with large numbers involved.
 The type of people affected: coverage will be greater if children, underprivileged or
minority groups are involved.
 The prominence of the people involved: there will be more interest if a celebrity or
other personality is affected.
 The nature of the incident: more attention will be given to repeat incidents or those
that result from mishandling of previous crisis events, or which cast doubt on the
integrity of the government or threaten the sovereignty of the country.
 The event’s ‘visibility’: vivid or graphic images can be quickly shared and give rise to
an unbalanced impression of the incident.
 The ‘fear appeal’: the higher the fear factor, the bigger the crisis.
 The provision of conflicting information from authorities, casting doubt on the
credibility of information provided.
The significance of these triggers makes it even more important that the tourism industry should
present a coordinated response and work closely with the national-level crisis management team.
Having said this, it can be helpful for individual tourismbusinesses to use existing communications
links of their own with the international travel and tourism trade and prospective tourists. This is
where benefits will be reaped from good and warm relations built up with the media and with the
customer-base in the pre-crisis period (this will be elaborated in Section 2). It will be helpful if the
same journalists and bloggers who filed initial reports on the crisis also file subsequent reports to
illustrate the progress being made, including identifying possible human interest stories.
The tourism system (i.e. including the destination, generating regions and transit between them,
after Leiper’s 1979 model) involves the local community as well as organisations from the public
and private sector; those directly involved in tourism and those involved indirectly through
linkages within the supply chain; and those local to the destination and located further afield,
including in different countries. In a crisis situation, all stakeholders should be incorporated in the
recovery programme and collaborate within it. In their investigation of stakeholder collaboration
within the context of threats to tourism from a cyclone affecting the Australian state of Queensland,
Jiang and Ritchie (2017) found that more effective outcomes were achieved when stakeholders
were strongly motivated to collaborate, and that motivations for collaboration were related either
to the perceived benefits of sharing available resources such as information and funding, or to