Resilience Leads COVID-19 Recovery
As travel restrictions ease and international borders begin to reopen, travellers will start to carefully choose their holiday destinations. PATA has long argued that destinations that will have a competitive advantage in the reopening of tourism are those that prioritise health & hygiene, resilience and sustainability.
To help tourism professionals, businesses and destinations not only need to be one step ahead in the COVID-19 recovery but, more importantly, to be fully prepared for any other crisis that will come, PATA has recently launched the Tourism Destination Resilience (TDR) programme.
Why Resilience?
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, resilience has become one of the buzzwords among practitioners and academics of all different sectors affected by the pandemic. In tourism, other terms that gained relevance include rebuild, bounce back, build back better… but resilience stands out as not only a strategy for recovery, but as a necessary process to ultimately achieve sustainable tourism development.
Tourism businesses and destinations across the globe realised they were not prepared to deal with a global-scale health & economic crisis. This made all tourism stakeholders – from DMOs to hotels and airlines – ask themselves:
"How can we recover from this but also make sure we are never caught off guard again?". In other words, "How can we be resilient to any other crises that may come?".
Resilience means different things to different people – and tourism stakeholders –, and we will talk more about that in next week's post (so stay tuned!). For now, we want to quickly introduce our definition:
Tourism Destination Resilience (TDR) is both a process and an outcome that enables tourism destinations to withstand adversity and bounce forward from crises and disasters.
But what does this mean? And how does it apply to COVID recovery?
The Tourism Destination Resilience (TDR) programme was developed to assist businesses and destinations in their COVID-19 recovery by helping them meet travellers' new expectations, wants and needs in the post-pandemic world. The programme provides, for instance, a comprehensive guide to post-crisis planning, that involves responding to the crisis, rethinking tourism models and, finally, strategising for recovery.
However, the programme does not stop there. TDR also guides tourism professionals on a step by step process towards resilience and sustainability. These are important not only to maintain the progress achieved after COVID recovery but also to withstand future challenges. Having a resilient and sustainable business or destination will significantly increase your competitiveness as well as make you "future-proof".
And how can you get started on resilience?
To start, we suggest registering for the TDR 10 online learning modules, available on PATA's Sustainability Resource Centre website. These modules are open-sourced and available for any tourism professional that wishes to boost their business or destination's COVID recovery, increase competitiveness and become more resilient and sustainable.
Tourism Destination Resilience is implemented by PATA with support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
