Global Challenges and Uncertainty in Tourism and Hospitality: Strategies for Resilience and Adaptation

The hospitality and tourism sectors encounter global challenges in today’s interconnected world, such as climate change, geopolitical uncertainties and the impacts of global warming. While these challenges can spark change and progress, they also pose significant hurdles. To thrive and expand, the hospitality and tourism sectors need to foster resilience and adaptation as they play a crucial role in the world economy, job creation, and fostering cultural understanding. Moreover, both sectors should strive to make travel and leisure activities more attainable to promote inclusivity and align with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The present chapter investigates a number of crises and critical events, as well as organizational solutions demonstrating adaptability, reflexive thinking, and resilience. The study utilizes the narrative review method, which aims to comprehensively analyze academic literature on resilience and adaptation strategies in the tourism and hospitality sector. Our findings reveal that the hospitality and tourism literature concerning global challenges revolves around six themes: community and local resilience, tourism and economic resilience, governance and policy implications, behavioral insights and social factor, structural changes and technological adaptations, and crisis management and recovery process. Future tourism resilience studies should adopt a comprehensive, multi-contextual approach, examining resilience theories in diverse situations and cultures, understanding communication processes during crises, economic and social impacts of disasters, sociocultural aspects of community resilience, and social interaction.