ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the threats and risks, together with a framework for conceptualizing and analyzing these issues. Tourist health and safety is a global theme associated with tourist travel as a wide range of threats, risks and potential hazards affect travellers. Throughout the history of travel, visitors have faced the tourist-related phenomenon of leaving their home environment to visit one which they may find unfamiliar, and the associated risks, hazards inherent in their lack of knowledge associated with that environment. The media are a powerful force in modern-day society and the imagery, headlines and reporting of global events have portrayed the immediacy of threats posed by terrorist groups and natural disasters to tourist destinations. The studies of travellers’ health published in the Journal of Travel Medicine reveals the correlation of specific tourist groups and market segments in terms of car accidents as well as certain risk factors that make specific groups more likely to incur injury.
