Drawing on crisis management theory and complexity theory, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of a prolonged COVID-19 induced lockdown on tourism small and medium enterprise (SME) operators’ well-being.
A mixed methods approach was used, with survey data from 226 SME tourism operators located in Victoria (Australia) and 33 interviews with a cross-representative selection of tourism stakeholders.
The findings of this study show that planned resilience, adaptive resilience, government communication (i.e. Roadmap to Recovery announcement) and revenue status are positively linked to well-being.
The cross-sectional nature of this study is not able to provide evidence of a temporal relationship between exposure and outcome, as both are examined at the same time. This study is restricted to one Australian State and may have limited generalisability.
The findings identify strategies to improve tourism SMEs resilience and their operator well-being. Programs designed to meet the needs of tourism SME owners and enhance access to well-being services, while training for SME tourism operators should focus on improving the diversification potential of the business.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first studies applying crisis management and complexity theories as theoretical lenses to explore the joint effect of organisational resilience and government communication on SME tourism operators’ well-being. The inclusion of communication on SME well-being is an area hitherto unexplored in the tourism literature.
