Content area
Full text
Introduction
Rural tourism is “tourism that takes place in the countryside” (Lane, 1994). This definition is one of the most popular attempts to establish rural tourism as separate term from urban tourism. Tourism in general and rural tourism, in particular, has become an important sector in the tourism industry (Knight, 1996) and has been promoted as a smokeless one as well.
Historically the interest in rural tourism across the world has been increasing in the last two decades because of its effectiveness in revitalising rural communities across many countries like Korea (Park and Yoon, 2009) and Taiwan (Chuang, 2013). Many developing countries see rural tourism as a development tool to impact the livelihoods of people in rural areas. Furthermore, earlier research has shown that rural tourism can produce a considerable economic boost (Chuang, 2013; Gao et al., 2009; Daugstad, 2008), revitalising rural society (Hwang and Lee, 2015; Su, 2013) and positively contribute to the local economy (Saarinen, 2007). As the COVID pandemic has caused lots of bottlenecks and delays in rural tourism projects, it is expected that the findings and recommendations of the present study on crisis management and resilience strategies would provide the rural tourism projects to be better prepared for a crisis in the near future.
The COVID-19 pandemic nearly brought the global tourism industry to a halt (Sharma et al., 2020) and researchers identified the underlying importance of examining hospitality and tourism in the pandemic context (Rivera, 2020). The research agenda so far has studied COVID-19 on tourism, in general. However, the impact of the pandemic on rural tourism has been sparse, and hence this study tries to address this research gap. The study adopts a qualitative approach where three case studies of rural tourism organisations were studied in depth to understand their response strategies to the COVID-19 crisis through the crisis management model. The three case studies were cross-compared and analysed in terms of crisis management and resilience strategies. An attempt was also made to determine the implications for managing and responding to future crises in rural tourism.
Liu (2006) has highlighted the importance of understanding rural tourism issues in different cultural and institutional contexts which can add new perspectives to the sector. The study examines three (3) case...