Political Instability, Transnational Tourist Companies and Destination Recovery in the Middle East after 9/11

Abstract

Abstract The change and mobility of images is one of the main forces influencing contemporary tourism. Tourists decide whether to travel to a destination or not on the basis of changing destination images. This is especially true for tourism destinations in the Middle East and North Africa after 9/11. But how do security related destination images affect the actions of the supply side agents? While the impact of incidents of violent political unrest and the consequent changes in destination images on tourist behaviour has been subject to wide academic research, there is a lack of similar studies concerning the supply side. The interdependencies and interactions of transnational hotel companies, local agents, and tour operators as well as their specific roles in the destination recovery process have hardly been researched. Moreover, the influence of travelling and changing security related destination images on the actions of supply side agents in the tourism industry has not been studied at all.  This paper aims to narrow this gap by presenting the results of more than 60 qualitative interviews with managers of the tourist industry in Tunisia, Egypt, and the UAE about the impact of violent political unrest on their actions after 9/11.  The analysis of the interviews leads to a new conceptualization of crisis reactions as processes of organizational learning, which can be typologized as demand stimulating, demand generating, and organizational reactions. This study proves that organizational reactions of transnational companies (TNCs) have the potential to seriously affect further destination development. In general, there seems to be a relation between intensity and duration of violent political unrest, organizational structure, and location choice of TNCs. With increasing risk, companies would reduce the intensity of their engagement and concentrate on strategic destinations until they would eventually totally disengage from a destination. In contrast to these general findings, it is quite astonishing that TNCs have not substantially changed their organizational structure after 9/11, but contributed profoundly to the stabilization and recovery of the destinations. The preliminary results suggest that this can only be explained by the local embeddedness of the companies, which influences their actual risk perceptions, future expectations, and actual reality construction. If that is true, the perspective on the role of TNCs for destination recovery processes and on the determinants of their crisis reactions has to be changed.