Analyzing destination resilience from a spatiotemporal perspective

Abstract

The tourism industry is vulnerable to external shocks. Various crises inevitably impact the tourism industry and tourist destinations negatively but at the same time bring opportunities to examine destination resilience in response to a real shock that is hard to simulate. To manage a crisis more effectively, two critical issues should be addressed: the duration of the impact of the crisis (i.e., temporal perspective) and the affected geographical scale (i.e., spatial perspective), which have been neglected in previous studies on destination resilience. To address the above gaps, this research develops a comprehensive, multi-stage, dynamic spatiotemporal analytical framework to firstly measure two aspects of tourism resilience (i.e., resistance and recovery), and secondly analyze the influencing factors of tourism resilience. The empirical context of international tourism in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic is used to demonstrate the applicability of the developed framework and relevant policy implications.