Chapter 12 Impacts of September 11

After the September 11 event in the United States, some Muslim destinations faced a severe decline in tourist arrivals because of the so-called neighborhood effect. Concurrently, other destinations performed extremely well. This chapter addresses the question of how the emergence of inconsistent tourism patterns within the same region can be explained. The analysis demonstrates that whereas arrivals from the Western countries decreased, intraregional tourism boomed and Muslim tourists avoided traveling to the Western destinations. This regionalization of travel behavior is explained by the rise of confrontational geopolitical world pictures in the Western and the Muslim worlds. This has created a new two-sided neighborhood effect, which has stabilized destinations in the Muslim world with a strong intraregional orientation.