Chapter 4: Crises and Resilience in the Age of Digitalization: Perspectivations of Past, Present and Future for Tourism Industry

Crises are bound to come in every industry, and they constantly disrupt the regular activities; they come unplanned, and hence the consequences can be severe. Risk management is an essential function of every business entity. During the ‘COVID-19 pandemic’, the corporate sector everywhere in the world faced many challenges in the form of short-term effects such as an immediate change in objectives and modes of working, project delays, significant diversions from the key goals and objectives, revenue loss and delays in decision making. Whether it is COVID-19 or any other crisis that brings the tourism industry to the downside, the most critical activity is recovering and rebounding more efficiently (Valeri, 2022). The literature on crises and resilience reveals that to provide relief in terms of upliftment of society, it is necessary to reach the poorer sections of the society, and the ‘government policy responses’ play a vital and pertinent role in inducing as well as stimulating the resilience of small, micro and medium-sized tourism enterprises during disaster (Estiri et al., 2022). The literature also suggests pondering upon some long-range tourism policies in Asian countries due to global crises (Cohen, 2012). Evidence is also available where the influence of economic crises on tourism destination performance can also be seen (Albattat et al., 2020; Chemli et al., 2020; Perles-Ribes et al., 2016; Toanoglou et al., 2022). Varied kinds of crises in an economy can completely disrupt and provoke a sharp and prolonged drop in tourist arrivals to the country, which can create a great deal of economic harm (Arora & Sharma, 2022). There are many adverse influences of economic crises and disasters caused by natural calamities like ‘weather or diseases’ on inbound tourists in various nations (Sio-Chong & So, 2020). Therefore, it becomes necessary for the researchers to analyze different kinds of resilience strategies in the tourism industry to suggest an outline for selecting supportive government initiatives that can contribute effectively towards resilience improvement in the tourism industry. One such resilience strategy which emerged so pervasively during crises was connecting the world digitally. Be it payments, be it tracking the patients and number of patients, be it finding corona zones, to finding the home stuff, everything became possible due to digital solutions.