Marketing of Tourism Destinations in the Post-Covid Era – Challenges of the New Normal

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an unprecedented crisis, causing an awkward impact on human life and the world economy. Despite the resilience that tourism has shown in response to previous crises, the depth and breadth of the impact of this pandemic on tourism have brought the sector to an almost total standstill, causing long-term difficulties for most tourist destinations. As the pandemic has evolved, how we live, work, and travel has changed, and demands, expectations, and preferences have become different. But an unprecedented crisis requires unprecedented action. Destination marketing is widely recognized as an essential component of destination management. As a result, the tenets of conventional marketing have been challenged in a struggle to adapt to the new normal. Thus, the objective of this paper is to identify and explore, based on the current literature review and direct survey research, the challenges faced by marketers in tourism destinations in an attempt to counter the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery and further sustainable development of the sector.