Crisis and Disaster Management for Tourism

Brent W. Ritchie

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781845411053
• eBook ISBN: 9781845413125
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Tourism destinations and businesses are becoming increasingly prone to the impacts of crises and disasters due to global environmental change and security risks. This is the first research based book that provides a strategic approach to understanding the nature of tourism crises and disasters before outlining tourism crisis and disaster planning, response, and longer term recovery and knowledge management strategies. It applies a wide range of theoretical perspectives and concepts to improve our understanding of both organisational crises and natural disasters. The book draws on examples from around the world including the USA, Europe, UK, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. It will be essential reading for tourism academics and students as well as tourism managers and government officials involved in tourism destination management and marketing.

Part 1

Setting the Context for Tourism Crisis and Disaster Management

Chapter 1

Introduction to Tourism Crisis and Disaster Management

International tourism flows are subject to disruption by a range of events that may occur in the destination itself, in competing destinations, origin markets, or they may be remote from either. The consequences may be either mild and relatively short term or have catastrophic impacts on existing industry systems. Major disruptions, also referred to as shocks, are felt in both origin and destination areas, affect both the public and private sectors and disrupt the travel plans of intending travellers.

Prideaux et al. (2003: 475)

Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to crisis and disaster management for the tourism industry. First, it defines tourism and the tourism industry and acknowledges tourism from a systems perspective. It notes the main characteristics that make tourism unique but also susceptible to change as a result of shocks, crises and disasters. The chapter suggests that decision-making of consumers can be vastly impacted by crises or disasters impacting upon business and society. Second, the chapter notes a move from crisis and disaster management to prevention and planning, suggesting a growing awareness of the impact of disasters and crises on society.

It advocates that far from ignoring crises and disasters and viewing them simply as a threat, tourism managers and destinations should embrace them as a part of the tourism system and should strategically plan for such events by identifying and understanding crises and disasters, developing and implementing management plans, and evaluating the success of those plans for more effective planning and adaptive management systems. The chapter concludes with an overview of the two main fields of theory and literature: organisational crisis management, and disaster and emergency management. It also provides a brief overview of key tourism literature and concludes with an outline of the book structure.

Crisis and Disaster Definitions

A number of authors have attempted to understand crises and disasters by first defining them. According to Keown-McMullan (1997: 8), a universally accepted definition of what constitutes a crisis has not yet been developed and it is unlikely to emerge in the near future. Pauchant and Mitroff (1992: 15) believe that a crisis is a ‘disruption that physically affects a system as a whole and threatens its basic assumptions, its subjective sense of self, its existential core’. Selbst (1978 in Faulkner, 2001: 136) defines a crisis as ‘any action or failure to act that interferes with an organisation’s ongoing functions, the acceptable attainment of its objectives, its viability or survival, or that has a detrimental personal effect as perceived by the majority of its employees, clients or constituents’. Selbst’s focus on perceptions implies that if an organisation’s public or stakeholders perceive a crisis, a real crisis could evolve from this misconception, illustrating that perception management is an important consideration in managing crises. Other definitions of crises are displayed in Table 1.1. Santana (2003) suggests that the definition of the term ‘crisis’ is problematic due to the construct itself, its application by different fields and its use jointly in the literature with terms such as disaster, catastrophe, jolt, problem and turning point. However, Laws and Prideaux (2005) make a useful point that agreement on a consistent typology for the terms describing tourism crises will help facilitate a dialogue with other researchers in the crisis management field, vital to advancing knowledge and understanding.

Common characteristics of crises tend to be that they are internal and thus the organisation has some power or influence over a crisis. Another common theme expressed in the definitions is that the scale of damage appears to be a key differentiating factor. If an incident or event can or does impact upon the survival, viability or foundation of an organisation, then it may be considered a crisis. The urgency and speed of dealing with an incident is also a key point in many of the definitions and suggests that crises may be surprises, which is why a proactive approach to crisis planning and management is important. For instance, Keown-McMullan (1997) notes that speed of a crisis developing and the speed of response is critical for managers. Nevertheless, as Santana (2003) suggests, crises are emotional situations, putting pressure on managers ensuring quality decisions are difficult to make and implement. Another theme is that a crisis is often a turning point for an organisation, which can have both positive or negative impacts and transformations for businesses and communities. This point is discussed throughout the book and especially in Part 4 of the book, which explores the transformation of organisations and destinations at the resolution stage of a crisis or disaster (Chapter 8), and the role of knowledge management and organisational learning in improving future crisis and disaster plans and reducing the chances of an incident occurring through development of future prevention and mitigation strategies, and adaptive management (Chapter 9).

Table 1.1 A comparison of crisis definitions

Author	Definition
Herman (1972)	Crisis is characterised by three dimensions: high threat, short decision time, and an element of surprise.
Fink (1986)	Crisis is an unstable time or state of affairs in which decisive change is impending – either one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome or one with the distinct possibility of a highly desirable and extremely positive outcome.
Brewton (1987)	Crisis should have some or all of the following features: severe disruption of operation, increased government regulation, negative public perception of the company, financial strain, unproductive use of management time, and loss of employee moral and support.
Reilly (1987)	A crisis implies elements of magnitude, the need for taking action, and the necessity of a timely response.
Shivastava and Mitroff (1987)	Corporate crises threaten a company’s most important goals of survival and profitability.
Darling (1994)	What defines a crisis in international business depends on a number of variables: the nature of the event; importance of the issue to foreign and US governments; impact on other firms and industries; how many and how quickly people inside and/or outside of a particular firm need to be helped or informed; who and how many individuals need interpretation of the events, and how accessible those people are; how much interaction with the media is necessary; what the media choose to emphasise; who and how many people need emergency care; how much the organisation needs to assert control and demonstrate that it is capable of responding; and how quickly the firm needs to respond. A crisis may also be defined by feelings of panic, fear, danger or shock.
Soñmez et al. (1994)	Any event which creates negative publicity and the period of time after a disaster occurrence which lasts until full recovery is achieved and pre-disaster conditions resume.
Keown-McMullan (1997)	Contrary to popular opinion, a crisis is not always bad or negative for an organisation. A crisis could, therefore, be considered as a turning point. To qualify as a crisis, the entire foundation of an organisation or business must be threatened. The idea of urgency and the speed with which decisions must be made are key components.
Beeton (2001)	Crises occur at all levels of tourism operations with varying degrees of severity, from much publicised environmental, economic and political disasters through to internally generated crisis such as accidents and sudden illness.
Prideaux et al. (2003)	Crises can be described as the possible but unexpected result of management failures that are concerned with the future course of events set in motion by human action or inaction precipitating the event.
Laws and Prideaux (2005)	1. An unexpected problem seriously disrupting the functioning of an organisation or sector or nation. 2. A general term for such problems.

Many of the features attributed to crises are equally applicable to disasters (Faulkner, 2001), and so confusion between their distinctions can occur with common overlaps between the two, where a crisis may occur as a direct result of a disaster. Kim and Lee (1998) in their paper use the two terms together, while Hills (1998) suggests that the boundary between natural and human-induced behaviour has blurred. Faulkner (2001) considers the principal distinction between what can be termed a ‘crisis’ and a ‘disaster’ to be the extent to which the situation is attributable to the organisation itself, or can be described as originating from outside the organisation. Thus, a ‘crisis’ describes a situation ‘where the root cause of an event is, to some extent, self-inflicted through such problems as inept management structures and practices or a failure to adapt to change’, while a disaster can be defined as ‘where an enterprise (or collection of enterprises in the case of a tourist destination) is confronted with sudden unpredictable catastrophic changes over which it has little control’ (Faulkner, 2001: 136). Here, Faulkner (2001) suggests that crises are able, to some degree, to be controlled and within the influence of managers, whereas disasters are often external and more unpredictable. As Prideaux et al. (2003: 478) suggest, ‘disasters can be described as unpredictable catastrophic change that can normally only be responded to after the event, either by deploying contingency plans already in place or through reactive response’. The key point is that external events and change may provide a greater degree of risk and uncertainty than internal events and change (Evans & Elphick, 2005).

Hills (1998) suggests, from an emergency planning perspective, that disasters are sudden and overwhelming events which occur for a limited duration in a distinct location. Although they may be limited by time and location, it may take a significant amount of time after a disaster to recover while some victims may never fully recover if they indeed survive. Therefore, disasters, and even crises can have a profound psychological aspect associated with them, which is discussed in Chapter 8 in the context of the recovery and final resolution of a disaster.

A disaster, as defined by the ISDR (2004: 338) is:

a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society causing widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected community/society to cope using its own resources. A disaster is a function of the risk process. It results from the combination of hazards, conditions of vulnerability and insufficient capacity or measures to reduce the potential negative consequences of risk.

Although disasters induced by natural conditions or ecosystems are beyond the control of humans, vulnerability is a direct result of human activity and living conditions, and a disaster is the realisation of a hazard (Smith, 1995). While natural disasters have been termed a ‘humanitarian disaster with a natural trigger’ (Pelling, 2003: 4), John Twigg (in ISDR, 2004: 22) elaborates by stating:

strictly speaking, there are no such things as natural disasters, but there are natural hazards. A disaster is the result of a hazard’s impact on the society. So the effects of a disaster are determined by the extent of a community’s vulnerability to the hazard (or conversely, its ability, or capacity to cope with it). This vulnerability is not natural, but the result of an entire range of constantly changing physical, social, economic, cultural, political, and even psychological factors that shape people’s lives and create the environments in which they live. ‘Natural’ disasters are nature’s judgment on what humans have wrought.

This quote clearly illustrates the wide variety of ways researchers and managers are able to perceive a natural disaster. Many authors have approached the study of disaster management through the application of concepts and theory from sociology, politics, geography, economics, information technology and the physical sciences. Readers are directed to the edited work by Quarantelli (1998), which illustrates how some of these different disciplines perceive or define the term ‘disaster’ from their own perspectives. Hazards are ‘potential threats to humans and their welfare … risks are the probability of hazard occurrence’ (Smith, 1995: 6) which lead to triggering events causing the disaster situation and possible impacts on tourism or tourist destinations.

As Cioccio and Michael (2007: 1) state, ‘[t]he nature of the tourism environment is often hazardous, where it is congruent with exotic scenery, unusual experiences or volatile natural settings. In such a landscape, inevitably in one locality or another, or across whole regions, there occur natural events which disrupt or destroy the physical base for tourism, and so threaten the existence of these regional enterprises’, not to mention both visitor and local lives. It is likely that the tourism environment in some destinations may become even more hazardous due to global environmental change and climate change. As Becken and Hay (2007) suggest, climate-tourism hotspots such as the European Alps and small island states are susceptible to increase in global warming resulting in reduced snow cover, increased avalanche risk and increased tropical cyclones. Furthermore, as de Freitas (2006) notes, there is no clear evidence to suggest whether climate change is producing extreme weather events.

With respect to disasters, there are a range of natural hazards that may occur as a result of natural or human processes. In both instances, a disaster (or indeed a crisis) threatens the existence of a system whether it is a nation state, social community, government, organisation, natural environment, eco-system or some other established system (including tourism). The next section of this book defines tourism, the ...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Titlepage
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Setting the Context for Tourism Crisis and Disaster Management
• Part 2: Tourism Crisis and Disaster Prevention and Planning
• Part 3: Tourism Crisis and Disaster Response, Implementation and Management
• Part 4: Tourism Crisis and Disaster Recovery, Resolution and Feedback
• References
• Index