The challenges of Covid19 in the tourism industry. The case of the Italian context

This paper has the challenge to verify whether and to what extent the crisis, related to Covid19, impacted the Italian tourism industry and how firms have reacted for its management. Crisis and its management have been defined by some scholars and applied in various context. The most common definition of tourism crisis is the one given by Glaesser (2006, p.6), for whom it can be defined as “an event which causes disruption in normal functioning of tourism-related businesses, damages all the reputation of the safety, attractiveness, and comfort of a touristic destination by negatively affecting the perceptions of visitors, as a result, negatively affects tourism economy and causes reduced tourist arrival and spending, delay doing business in the tourism sector”. Starting from this contribution, lots of authors have defined tourism crisis on a political (O’Brien, 2012), organizational (Pauchant and Douville, 1994), environmental (Pearson and Mitroff, 1993) or pandemic (Yang and Chen, 2009) according to the different sources that lead to crisis situations. All these contributions focus on a crisis process, which unexpectedly causes disruptions in normal functioning of tourism-related businesses (Glaesser, 2006). The paper is organized as follows: after a literature review with reference to bibliometric analyses in the field, we go through the methods and models we decided to adopt (data collection and data analysis), getting to the main findings. The paper ends with its conclusions and hints for further research related to the crisis management, and how firms react to a global crisis that involves all the world community through a sustainable approach that ensures security, a safe environment and a full comfortable experience. The pandemic emergency has revealed new needs to be satisfied, travellers look for safe experiences.