Does the travel & tourism industrial crisis induced by government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic warrant a “full-spectrum intervention” to ‘democratise’ tourism for a ‘post-capitalist’ future?
Raoul V Bianchi thinks so.
It’s a “Good Tourism” Insight.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented crisis.
Not only has it brought the global economy to a standstill, leading the IMF to predict that it would result in the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the pandemic has revealed deep structural fault lines within and across societies, potentially heralding a fundamental restructuring of the global economy.
The pandemic has also highlighted the magnitude of tourism’s global economic importance while starkly revealing its underlying vulnerabilities and myriad injustices.
Reliant as they are on open borders and perishable inventory that cannot be stockpiled, the tourism industries have been some of the hardest hit, not least in the tourism-dependent economies of southern Europe and small island developing states in the Global South.
In the space of a few short months between late 2019 and early 2020, the pandemic shifted public attention away from concerns related to the effects of ‘overtourism’, to the urgent need to ‘rebuild’ tourism economies and protect the businesses and livelihoods devastated by quarantine and lockdown measures.
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