Tourism Policy: Structure, Content, and Process - Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies - page 343

that will assume responsibility for each major dimension of the policy realization, (2) establish initial
estimates of the financial requirements, and (3) provide preliminary timelines for the launching
of all major facilities, events, and programs that support the destination vision. The speci cs
of implementation are the object of tourism planning. These speci cs are examined in detail in
Chapter 16.

TRANSLATING POLICY INTO REALITY

It must be emphasized that once overall supply-and-demand development strategies have been
enunciated and appropriate organizational structures put in place, these strategies must be translated
into speci c policies and programs of an operational nature. At this level, the management process
becomes one of detailed planning and implementation of the many tasks necessary to provide the
individual tourist with the satisfying, yet challenging experience that he or she is seeking. Although
detailed discussion of tourism planning is beyond the scope of this chapter, the need to effectively
translate strategic ideas into real-world actions cannot be too strongly stressed. Without effective
execution, even the most brilliant policies will prove of little value.
An example illustrating the need to translate policy into reality is crisis management. Today, every
tourism organization needs crisis management policies and plans that work. A discussion of crisis
management follows.

FORMULATING POLICY TO DEAL WITH CRISES

Despite the best efforts to formulate tourism policies that support destination development, to plan
and execute the development of an attractive tourism destination, and to effectively manage a
tourism destination, sometimes the unthinkable happens.
The September 11, 2001, terrorist bombing of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon in
Washington, D.C.; the 2002 bombing of a tourist- lled nightclub in Bali, Indonesia; the 2004 bombing
of the commuter trains in Madrid, Spain; the 2003 failure of the electrical grid in eastern North
America all created sudden disruptions in the normally smooth functioning of tourism. Other less
sudden but more widespread happenings such as the Iraq war, the 2003 outbreaks of SARS (severe
acute respiratory syndrome) in China and Canada, the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the
United Kingdom, the forest fires in the western United States, the tsunamis in Indonesia (2004) and
Japan (2011), and especially the major economic recession of 2008 - 2009 all affected people ' s desire

and ability to travel, and thus the well-being of tourism destinations around the world.
Although these crises were not all directly related to the tourism sector, their widespread
repercussions created situations that seriously affected or interfered with people

s willingness to
travel, or the smooth functioning of the tourism system. They were thus the root cause of crises that
tourism managers needed to understand or to take account of in their ongoing management of
tourism destinations.

'

Types of Crisis-Causing Events

In an effort to help improve our formal understanding of the nature of crisis management related to
both unthinkable happenings and major events having global repercussions, Mitroff and Anagnos
divide crisis-causing events into seven general types and/or categories of risk:

1. Economic crises, such as labor strikes, labor shortage, market crashes, major declines in stock

prices, and fluctuations or declines in major earnings