Organizational learning in tourism and hospitality crisis management

Tourism and hospitality organizations have always been exposed to disruptions, stresses, and crises, making the management of these adversities a necessary skill. The prolonged and complex turbulence that the industry is often facing from epidemics and pandemics, climate change and extreme environmental phenomena, or political instability and economic crashes, raise questions: Do these organizations learn from the crises they experience? If so, how do they learn, and what do they do with this learning?

Organizational Learning in Tourism and Hospitality Crisis Management brings together an array of expert academic analyses of the latest thinking and practice on these questions. Drawing on studies conducted around the world including Greece, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, UK, and USA, the contributors apply a wide range of organizational learning and knowledge management theoretical perspectives and concepts to offer new insights into crisis-induced learning in a tourism and hospitality context. The book will be an excellent resource for scholars and students as well as managers of tourism and hospitality organizations, tourism policymakers, and government officials who are involved in tourism destination management.

Auteur

Dr. Zahed Ghaderi, is currently Assistant Professor and faculty member at Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. He has more than 20 years of experience in both academic and practical fields in travel and tourism and has widely published high quality articles in well-known tourism journals on the subject of tourism crisis management, organizational learning and sustainable tourism. Moreover, he is a writer and researcher who contributed a lot to the field of international tourism management.

Alexandros Paraskevas is Professor in Strategic Risk Management and Chair in Hospitality Management at the London Geller College of Hospitality and Tourism He is also the Director of ICHARM (International Centre for Hospitality and Aviation Resilience Management) in the University of West London.
His hospitality industry background includes internal auditing and operations management positions for over a decade with Marriott and Starwood. His academic background includes 15 years of service at the Oxford School of Hospitality Management (Oxford Brookes University).
Alexandros researches the governance and management of risks/crises both in an organisational and tourism destination context. He has led numerous hotel industry projects in the areas of risk, crisis, disaster management and business continuity and authored several academic articles and book chapters on these topics

Texte du rabat

We live in an uncertain world characterized by the occurrence of unexpected incidents in different corners of the globe which can have widespread adverse consequences. It is therefore vital to be prepared for, and attempt to prevent or mitigate the negative effects of such crises through crisis management tools and organizational learning practices. According to the current literature, the tourism and hospitality industry has been exposed to dramatic impacts from human-induced crises and natural disasters during past decades. The repercussions are manifested in the form of business failure, economic losses, tarnished destination image, physical damage to infrastructure and facilities, psychological effects, and other undesirable outcomes. Many of these crisis events are recurrent and their effects can be averted or ameliorated through practicing organizational learning and engaging in preparation activities. However, limited attempts have been made by industry players to detect early warning signals, learn from crises and prepare for the next ones. Despite the important contributions in terms of 'lessons learned' from historical analyses, they usually provide little information on how tourism organizations facing the crisis attempted to manage it proactively and what they did reactively (Paraskevas and Quek, 2019).

Comprehensive sources in this field is thus necessary to fill this gap. Few research studies are available to discuss organizational learning in the process of tourism crisis management. A comprehensive collection of book chapters concentrating on both theory and practice will shed some light on this issue and propose recommendations for future investigation. Hence, the aim of this publication is to discover various aspects of organizational learning in tourism and hospitality crisis management and discuss future prospects. The book will be the main resource for future research in the field of tourism crisis management and organizational learning.

There would be several reasons for such demand. First, this subject is relatively new in the hospitality and tourism field, covering many critical aspects of organizational learning in tourism crisis management. This novelty and in-depth discussions of practical lessons across the globe could be of great interest to both academics and practitioners alike. In recent years, many tourism and hospitality firms have applied the essence of crisis management and organizational learning in their contingency planning and crisis management frameworks. Tourism and hospitality managers have fully realized the importance of learning from previous crises and thus applied these learning strategies in their preparation programs. Therefore, they would be very eager more than before to use this material and recommend it to colleagues, employees, etc.

Another potential demand would be academics, students and researchers in the both fields of organizational learning and tourism crisis management. Most universities and tourism institutions either directly or indirectly have developed new curriculums on tourism crisis management at Masters and PhD levels with special focus on organizational learning and preparation. This book will be of great interest for these people as previous resources are relatively outdated and furthermore, they did not cover the subject of organizational learning in details.