THE IMPACTS OF COVID-19 ON THE TOURISM SECTOR: A STUDY ON ACCELERATED DIGITALIZATION AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Muhammad Usman Shoukat

doi:10.71146/kjmr947

Authors

Muhammad Usman Shoukat Department of Hospitality and Tourism, Manchester Metropolitan University, England. Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.71146/kjmr947

Keywords:

COVID-19, tourism sector, digitalization, crisis management, organizational resilience, digital transformation, tourism recovery, smart tourism, business continuity, sustainable tourism

Abstract

COVID-19 has made the global tourism industry face unprecedented challenges, with the number of tourists, business revenue, jobs lost, and the impact on the operational performance plummeting. This study explores COVID-19's effects on the tourism sector, focusing on the accelerated digitalisation and crisis handling processes. A quantitative research methodology was chosen and data were analyzed from a sample of 250 respondents from hotel firms, travel agencies, tour operators and hospitality firms. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were employed to analyse the relationship between digital transformation, the effectiveness of crisis management and organizational resilience. The results showed that the pandemic period had a significant impact on the decrease in tourist numbers by 72%, the decrease in tourist bookings by 78% and the decrease in business revenue by 69%. As a result of these disturbances, 88% of organizations started using online booking systems, 84% started using digital marketing platforms and 81% started using contactless payment technologies. The study also revealed that organizations that are highly digitalized were able to recover 81% of their revenue, whereas those organizations that are less digitalized were able to recover 52% of their revenue. Digitalization and organizational resilience were found to be positively correlated with each other, with a strong positive correlation (r = 0.84). Other recovery-related performance components, such as crisis management, including health and safety measures, digital customer engagement, and business continuity planning, also had a significant impact. The study has found that accelerated digitalization was a key enabler for the tourism organizations in coping with the COVID-19 crisis and the process of recovery afterwards. The results call for the adoption of digital transformation and strategic crisis management in the tourism development policies to enhance tourism resilience, competitiveness and sustainability in the international tourism.

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