The Concept and Category of Tourism Crisis Management

The World Tourism Organization defines tourism crisis as "an unexpected event that affects travelers' confidence in their destinations and disrupts their normal operations. This kind of event may occur in various forms for many years. "

Tourism crisis can be divided into four types according to its spatial scope: enterprise tourism crisis, regional tourism crisis, national tourism crisis and international tourism crisis. Among them, the regional tourism crisis is aimed at those tourism crises that have a significant impact on the tourism of a city or a larger region, such as the tourism crisis of tourist destinations caused by unexpected events in the region. For example, the tourism crisis caused by water supply in Wuxi in 2007. From the perspective of management, tourism crisis can be divided into two types: external crisis and internal crisis according to the different sources of leading risk factors that cause the crisis. The external crisis is a tourism crisis caused by factors other than tourism, and the internal crisis is mainly caused by tourism itself.

The international research on tourism crisis began in 1970s. From 65438 to 0974, the world tourism industry was severely impacted by the global energy crisis, and the International Travel Research Association began to pay attention to this crisis. The theme of the association's annual meeting is "the contribution of travel research in the crisis era", which is the first time that tourism crisis management has attracted the attention of the world. In the next 30 years, especially with the "9. 1 1" incident in the United States, the explosion in Bali, Indonesia, and the SARS epidemic, tourism management departments and research institutions have conducted in-depth research on all aspects of tourism crisis management and achieved certain results.

China's tourism industry has not developed for a long time, and the previous understanding and research on the tourism crisis were relatively superficial. However, with the accelerating trend of global economic integration, some unexpected events at home and abroad have triggered a tourism crisis, which has brought a certain impact on China's tourism industry, and tourism crisis management has also attracted the attention of some domestic institutions and people. Especially after the SARS epidemic in 2003 caused great losses to the tourism industry in China, some domestic government departments, tourism workers, experts and scholars began to study the tourism crisis. However, at present, the research on tourism crisis management in China only stays at the level of some experts and scholars, and there is not much research on tourism crisis management at the local level, especially in tourist destination cities. Even though the crisis management implemented in some places is usually post-event crisis management and management based on perceptual knowledge, it is still far from real crisis management. As a public emergency, tourism crisis is an important part of emergency management. As governments at all levels in China pay more and more attention to strengthening emergency management, tourism crisis management will become an important task for government departments at all levels and the tourism industry.

(B) the type of tourism crisis

To carry out effective tourism crisis management, we must first analyze the factors that cause tourism crisis. In recent years, with the increasing risk factors that may lead to tourism crisis and the diversification of crisis manifestations, the classification methods of tourism crisis have also shown a diversified trend. Crisis events can be divided into different types from the comprehensive aspects of motivation, reasons and influence scope of crisis events that endanger the development of tourism. The negative impact of different nature and types of crisis events on tourism has different scope, form and degree. Recognizing the nature and types of crisis events is very important for taking correct prevention and response measures.

According to the causes of tourism crisis, it can be divided into ecological crisis, social crisis, sudden public health crisis, political crisis, economic crisis and tourism itself.

1. Crisis from ecology. It includes both natural disasters and ecological crises caused by human factors. There are mainly meteorological disasters such as floods, blizzards, hail and typhoons, and major disasters such as earthquakes, landslides and mudslides.

2. Crisis from society. Mainly refers to the tourism crisis caused by some unexpected events in human social activities, such as road, waterway, railway, civil aviation and other tourist traffic accidents, urban social accidents that affect or interrupt the normal water supply, power supply and gas supply in cities, safety accidents such as communications, information networks and special equipment, criminal crimes such as arson, robbery and murder, and crises caused by major environmental pollution and ecological damage accidents.

3. Sudden public health crisis. It refers to the tourism crisis caused by various sudden diseases that bring great harm to human health. Including sudden major infectious diseases (such as SARS, avian influenza, plague, cholera, schistosomiasis, etc.). ), mass unexplained diseases, major food and occupational poisoning, major animal epidemics, and other events that seriously affect the health of tourists.

4. Political crisis. It mainly includes wars, coups, terrorist attacks, economic security incidents, targeted sabotage incidents with great influence and crises caused by large-scale mass incidents.

5. From the economic crisis. It is mainly due to macroeconomic fluctuations, such as financial crisis leading to economic recession or even economic crisis, which has a great impact on tourism demand and tourism supply. Including economic stagnation or recession, stock market decline and major exchange rate changes.

6. The crisis comes from tourism itself. Mainly refers to the major events that directly threaten the tourism industry or tourism professionals and affect tourism activities within the scope of tourism business, such as major tourism traffic accidents, casualties caused by large-scale activities, hotel fires, accidents of tourism facilities, financial crisis of tourism enterprises, etc.