Rethinking Management and Promotion of Tourist Destinations Amidst COVID-19: Good Practices and Challenges

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has set a massive impact on the tourism industry through border closures, lockdowns and collapse of air travel. This conceptual research focuses on how tourism destinations strive to manage the health crisis and promote tourism amidst COVID-19. To achieve this, it analyses health crisis management in previous pandemic like situations, through the measures and problems that were dealt with as lessons learnt; highlights the impacts of COVID-19; identifies current practices and challenges of selected countries such as USA, Italy, Singapore, Japan, Greece, China, and Spain. Countries chosen for this research are either reliant on tourism or have dealt with the pandemic in many ways resulting in altered numbers of cases and deaths. The study adopts a qualitative approach, in analysing data derived from different sources such as official websites, social media campaigns, news and destination press releases on governmental actions of different countries and literature related to crisis management. Firstly, by identifying responses and measures taken to plan, support and promote tourism amidst COVID-19. Followed by thematically analysis using pre-decided themes of ‘good practices and challenges’ for tourism. The findings indicate the different good practices adopted by governments in assisting to manage this crisis and promoting the destinations through several campaigns to revive. It highlights challenges in planning, development and promotion amidst COVID-19 and proposes an integrated strategy for better crisis management.