Image Source: Travindy
Citizens of the U.S. and the world were deeply shocked and saddened when a gunman shot and killed about 50 patrons at an Orlando nightclub this past weekend.
While the shooter’s primary targets were the people enjoying an evening out, a secondary object of such incidents is typically tourism, with the aim of terrorizing a population so much that people don’t travel there, thereby harming the economy. By
The multiple recent terrorist attacks in diverse places such as London and California ought to be a warning to the tourism industry that it is entering into a new and dangerous age. In the past, most tourism centers assumed that either they would not be targets of a terrorism attack or that the attack would be against a highly specific and well-known target. Classically it was assumed that we could almost predict which areas would be most prone to terrorism attacks. The prevailing paradigm argued that terrorists were most likely to strike locations that were high on the following scales:
Scholars and security specialists based this paradigm on attacks such as those in New York, London, and Madrid. The security and tourism industries however did not consider locations such as in the Middle East as being relevant to tourism. Both the multiple incidents in Europe and the United States creates enough anomalies to cause tourism scholars and practitioners to question if the former paradigm does not need revisions and updating. Tourism Tidbits presents this month some of the new realities that tourism professionals need to consider.
Read more here.
Governments, industry representative groups and individual businesses are all seeking to develop improved management of risks so that potential crises can be avoided. This AICST report offers a broad coverage of risks related to tourism in the Asia Pacific region and strategic approaches to managing these risks.
by Jeff Wilks and Stewart Moore
