Dear Colleagues,

The COVID-19 pandemic is an external shock that struck the global travel industry. How tourism will evolve in the post-pandemic world is still unknown, and this creates an interesting research field. External shocks with enormous negative effects on international tourism that have previously been studied in academia include disasters such as the SARS epidemic (Page et al., 2006), the Ebola epidemic (Mizrachi and Fuchs, 2016), the financial crisis of 2008 (Smeral, 2009), and the Arab Spring of 2010 (Perles-Ribes et al., 2017). Other crises include terrorist attacks such as 9/11 (Kosová and Enz, 2012) or the bombings in Bali (Gurtner, 2016), as well as natural disasters such as earthquakes (Wearing et al., 2020) or the Australian bushfires (Schweinsberg et al., 2020). Each crisis provided not only negative effects, but also opportunities for change, and—from a research perspective—new knowledge about coping strategies, as well as possible future scenarios for the tourism industry.

This Special Issue “From Over-Tourism to Zero-Tourism: Opportunities for a New Beginning?” addresses key changes and current opportunities in tourism and business, covering a wide range of topics related to negative external shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Special Issue, we aim to cover both tourism demand and supply. Selected papers may address the issues of changes in demand; for instance, tourists' cognitive, emotional, and behavioural reactions for negative shock; shifts in consumer behaviour and changes in travel behaviour; characteristics of a crisis and resulting changes in demand. Authors are welcome to submit papers on coping strategies from different perspectives, and focus on crisis management in tourism, structural changes in the global tourism and hospitality sectors, public measures to promote tourism after crises, (sustainable) recovery strategies for the tourism industry, or strategies for the crisis preparedness of tourist destinations. We also invite papers that engage with the impact of the pandemic on sustainable tourism, answering the questions about the long-term effects of COVID-19 and the future of responsible and sustainable tourism after the crisis. This Special Issue also aims to cover the broad topic of current and future opportunities for the tourism industry; for example, in the form of adaptation and reinvention of business models with a focus on hygiene issues, as well as non-pharmaceutical interventions.

This Special Issue will include extended and enriched versions of selected peer-reviewed papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Tourism and Business (ICTB) (https://www.hslu.ch/en/lucerne-school-of-business/research/conferences/ictb). The conference will be held in Lucerne, Switzerland, 24-27 August 2022. The 4th International Conference on Tourism and Business (ICTB) will be jointly organised by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Switzerland), Mahidol University International College (Thailand), and Edinburgh Napier University (Scotland).

We welcome papers concentrating on local, regional and international perspectives on tourism recovery and resilience, with special attention to comparison of different regions of countries. This Special Issue accepts both theoretical papers and empirical research papers using qualitative methods, quantitative methods, and mixed-methods research.

Prof. Dr. Timo Ohnmacht
Dr. Anna Para
Guest Editors

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• tourism
• external shock
• COVID-19
• resilience
• crisis management