Risk & Crisis Management in Tourism Sector:
Recovery from Crisis
in the OIC Member Countries
41
prior to the event the competent authorities had established relationships andpractised emergency
procedures in the event of a terrorist attack (World Economic Forum, 2015). As a result, the events
had no impact on tourism arrivals.
Australia also offers a good example of planning for crises in tourism. Following the terrorist attack
of 9/11 in 2001 in the USA, it developed a National Tourism Incident Response Plan, establishing a
response framework and actions for national, state, and territory governments to ensure rapid,
detailed, and targeted responses to incidents with an impact on the tourism industry (World
Economic Forum, 2015).
The project team’s research into destination crises around the world indicates that the principal
pre-crisis management steps for the tourism sector are to:
1. Set up a tourism crisis recovery task force, ideally linked to and working with the national
DRR body.
2. Appoint representatives fromNTAs/NTOs and the private sector, with a designated officer
to act as the task force’s spokesperson, who will work closely with the DRR institution
spokesperson to ensure consistency of message.
3. Maintain up-to-date market knowledge in order to maintain understanding of how
markets may react at the time of a crisis.
4. Cultivate good relations with the media, so that in the event of a crisis journalists or
bloggers who have been identified as being positively predisposed towards the destination
can quickly be deployed to disseminate positive messages.
5. Create warm relations with individual tourists, so that in the event of a crisis there is an
existing customer-base of people who feel warmly about the destination.
6. Plan policies, procedures and strategies to guide actions if a crisis occurs.
7. Establish capacity building activities to enhance contingency planning to 41rganiza the risk
of personal safety to tourists and employees, as well as property damage.
8. Promote individual and family preparedness among employees.
9. Foster tourism clusters at local level and their integration into their communities’
contingency planning.
In the pre-event phase, a range of policies, procedures, multi-representative organization
structures and plans need to be established to prepare for and address a range of possible crises.
As with the DRR, the composition of a task force will vary from place to place: in Fiji, a Tourism
Action Group consisting of representatives from across the travel industry is activated in the case
of crisis, for instance after Hurricane Winston in 2016. The grouping had three aims: public
relations (to reassure people that most of the infrastructure was intact), marketing (especially
tactical campaigns to show prospective visitors that Fiji remained an attractive destination), and
finance (to secure funds through arrangements with the travel trade) (TourismFiji, 2016).
The planning process is informed by knowledge and understanding of how tourist markets and the
international travel and tourism trade respond to the different types of crisis. Scenario planning is
a useful approach in these early stages, i.e. the preparation of contingency plans related to a range