COVID-19 and tourism: What can we learn from the past?

Tracing the Impact Pathways of COVID-19 on Tourism and Developing Strategies for Resilience and Adaptation in Iran

The COVID-19 epidemic has caused unprecedented impacts on the travel and tourism industry. The current study traced the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism in Iran using an “Impact Pathway (IP)” approach to identify impacts and possible mitigation strategies. The results illustrate two main impact pathways: negative impacts along the economic-institutional and socio-cultural dimensions, and positive impacts along the physical-environmental dimension. Using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) and ANP (analytic network process) models, we identified defensive and review strategies as optimal for increasing resilience against the impacts of COVID-19. These strategies control the threats and weaknesses of negative impacts and enhance the opportunities and strengths emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic for tourism. We use this information to identify optimal strategies for dealing with the impacts of this crisis on tourism. Most prominently among them is the development of an integrated management system that improves the coordination of the response of local government to crisis and that better orchestrates the combined efforts and integration of non-governmental organizations.

Were Culture and Heritage Important for the Resilience of Tourism in the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 on the world tourism is clear and obvious. Still, modelling the impact on individual countries faces many problems from data availability to the multitude of underlying variables rather difficult to capture. This study used simple and multiple regression to research possible effects of the recent pandemic to the fall in the volume of tourism in 20 European countries, throughout the 20-month period. The results of this study were rather surprising showing that the relative fall in tourism cannot be explained only by incidence of COVID-19 by countries, while in multiple regression by adding the variables of distance of travel and composition of tourism by facilities coefficients of determination were very low. Adding variables of natural and cultural heritage as well as of cultural activities somewhat improved the baseline model with the best fitting variable of culture visits adding 11.8 percentage points to the explanatory power of the model, while culture employment and culture consumption added a possibly important 5.6 and 2.6 points, respectively. Although these findings are in line with recent literature of resilience and changes in tourism due to pandemic, a more thorough research is needed to further investigate these relations.

COVID-19 and Tourism: Analyzing the Effects of COVID-19 Statistics and Media Coverage on Attitudes toward Tourism

COVID-19 has significantly influenced tourism, including tourists’ and residents’ attitudes toward tourism. At the same time, attitudes and consumer confidence are important for economic recovery in the tourism sector. This study explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s attitudes toward tourism by analyzing time-series data on the number of COVID-19 positive cases, vaccinations, news sentiment, a total number of daily mentions of tourism, and the share of voice for positive and negative sentiment toward tourism. The applied data analysis techniques include descriptive analysis, visual representation of data, data decomposition into trend and cycle components, unit root tests, Granger causality test, and multiple time series regression. The results demonstrate that the COVID-19 statistics and media coverage have significant effects on interest in tourism in general, as well as the positive and negative sentiment toward tourism. The results contribute to knowledge and practice by describing the effects of the disease statistics on attitudes toward tourism, introducing social media sentiment analysis as an opportunity to measure positive and negative sentiment toward tourism, and providing recommendations for government authorities, destination management organizations, and tourism providers.