ABSTRACT
The travel and tourism industry is susceptible to a wide range of internal and external forces and is impacted heavily by crisis events resulting in negative tourist perceptions. Unpredictable negative events, be they natural catastrophes or human induced disasters, pose an unprecedented challenge for the tourism trade as they can disrupt business activities or in the more serious instances wipe out entire tourism operations. Until recently, the industry’s dealings with crisis situations have been portrayed in the emergent though disjointed literature on tourism crisis management as reactive. Such a response is, however, seen as lacking the ability to effectively respond to such events.
