Imagined Futures of post-Covid-19 Tourism in Antalya

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a deep crisis in all tourism destinations in the world, and so did the sun-sea-sand tourism city of Antalya. Will it go ‘back to normal’ after the crisis or will the crisis trigger a significant change? Will it show an engineering or ecological resilience in the future on the one hand or an adaptive resilience on the other? Because the future is open, actors in the tourism industry face, like all actors, a radical uncertainty about it. Under these conditions, they can only ground their decisions on so-called fictional expectations. In this paper, we connect the ‘theory’ of resilience with fictional expectations and explore the expectations of tourism entrepreneurs, managers of tourism associations, and government officials in the tourism city of Antalya with a qualitative research approach based on in-depth interviews with leading hoteliers and discourses of tourism leaders in Antalya's tourism. Some expect a return to business as usual, some expect a continuation of changes set in before the crisis as engineering resilience, and others changes triggered by Covid-19 as adaptive resilience. In addition, Covid-19 has intensified collaboration between key actors to strengthen the city’s tourism industry in the future.