THE IMPACT OF RELIGION ON TOURISM AND THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY (A (A CASE STUDY OF OMEGA FIRE MINISTRIES) [PDF]
in HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT, Projects on August 9, 2020CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Nowadays, tourism and hospitality industry are important economic sector in many countries. Between 2004 and 2020, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) forecasts that international travel will increase from 760 million trips per annum to 1.5 billion trips (WTO, 1998). If domestic trips are included, the 2020 total will be 15 billion trips per annum. Globally, tourism is a $625 billion industry, the single largest non-government economic sector in the world (WTO, 2005). Europe registers a falling growth rate from about 4 (the period: 1980-2001) to 3 percent (the period: 1995-2020); the regions with a dynamic growth rate are all related with Asia. The globalisation of the tourism and hospitality industry has led to a rapid expansion of tourism businesses on an international scale in order to expand their market share and profitability.
As Pforr (2006) points out, the enormous growth tourism has experienced in the past 50 years, also as a consequence of technological advancements in sectors such as transportations, Internet etc, which brought the world’s many destinations, no matter how far, within reach, has resulted in a much stronger interconnectedness and complexity within the tourism system and made the industry in many regions around the world an important factor in their socio-economic development.
However, these processes have also opened businesses up to a wider set of “global risks” involved in running businesses at such a scale, as globalisation is often seen as complex and chaotic (Jessop, 1999). Tourism and hospitality industry is often described as a fragile industry in that demand for travel is highly susceptible to numerous shocks, such as wars, outbreaks of deadly contagious diseases, incidents of terrorism, economic fluctuations, currency instability, energy crises, and so on. Many scholars have noted increasing number of disasters and crises, which affect the tourism and hospitality industry, ranging from natural to human influenced incidents. In recent years the global tourism industry has experienced many serious crises and disasters including terrorist attacks, political instability, economic recession, bio security threats and natural disasters (Boniface & Cooper, 2005). The globalization of hospitality and tourism market is so remarkable that smallscale crises in one part of the world can have a significant impact on other parts of the world. Contemporary crises do not recognize or respect national borders and do not confine themselves to a particular policy area (say health or energy).
Tourism is therefore highly susceptible to external factors and pressures in the wider operating environment. However, tourism is also an important economic sector for many countries and many destinations are dependent upon tourism for their growth and survival. (Douglas, 2003).
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Tourism industry plays a vital role in the economy for all of the countries of the world, providing employment, incomes, taxes revenues and foreign exchange. All of these features come from visitors when visiting the destinations, whereas the visitors will play a role in the income of the economics and increasing the GDP. At the same time, these benefits would not be achieved without political stability. There are a lot of things which affect tourist destinations such as wars, conflicts, crises, terrorism and SARS. Political instability related with tourism can have very negative effects on tourism destinations that will result in the decline of the number of tourists who visit the destinations and also will bring negative effect to the tourism industry because tourism is a sensitive and a volatile industry and all of these effects from political instability such as armed attacks, civil wars, bombings, attacks on tourists, wars, change in government, threat of war with another country, which will deter or obstruct the image of the destination through media reporting and government policies and even word of mouth reporting.
