Tourism Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Twenty years ago, geographer Mike Crang noted that tourism can be “an active agent in the creative destruction of places in what can be a violent, contested, unequal, but sometimes welcomed, transformative and productive process” (Crang, 2004, p. 75). During the last two decades, tourism has indeed been an agent of change. Tourism has globally been promoted as a tool for economic diversification and has proved to play a pivotal role in generating employment and fostering economic growth, estimated to be responsible for 9,1% to global GDP in 2023 (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2024). Between 2004 and 2019, international tourist arrivals have grown from approximately 720 million to 1462 million (Statista, n.d.). The COVID-19 pandemic inflicted heavy losses in the sector as international tourism was brought to a halt in early 2020 by the pandemic, resulting in a 72% decrease in tourist arrivals in one year, that is from 1462 million in 2019 to only 406 million in 2020 (Statista, n.d.). However, this particular indicator of tourism is estimated to reach pre-pandemic levels in 2024 (UNWTO, 2024a). Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic is the most severe crisis the tourism industry has ever had to deal with. However, as Gibson (2021) notes, the pandemic should not be regarded as a singular event. There are numerous challenges tourism as a sector has to deal with, ranging from a global environmental emergency and climate change to more local crisis situations like volcano eruptions, bushfires and economic downturns. This underscores how tourism is always entangled with broad ranging social, cultural and environmental processes.