Do Geopolitical Crises Really Matter: The Response of Small Business Owners in the Tourism and Hospitality Sector in Jordan to the Adjacent Gaza–Israel Conflict

This study explores how small business owners in the hospitality sector in Jordan cope with the threats from the adjacent Gaza-Israel conflict. While crisis research in tourism has focused mainly on macro-level indicators and managerial responses to events, less is known about the psychological processes used by small hospitality business owners to evaluate such geopolitical tensions and translate them into coping reactions. Using a transactional perspective on stress, appraisal, and coping, this study explores how business owners perceive threats and adopt coping mechanisms under unstable geopolitical conditions. Semi-structured interviews with small hospitality business owners in Jordan reveal that geopolitical conflict is not automatically perceived as a catastrophic threat. Rather, threat emerges through a person–environment transaction when owners interpret the conflict as harmful, uncertain, or beyond control within their business context. The findings further reveal that owners combine problem-focused coping, such as operational and marketing adjustments, with emotion-focused coping, such as pragmatic optimism, positive reappraisal, goal resetting, and the normalization of instability. By foregrounding cognitive appraisal and coping in this way, the study extends tourism and hospitality crisis research beyond macro-level outcomes and offers practical insights into strengthening the resilience of small hospitality businesses in geopolitically unstable tourism regions.