Nowadays the world is witnessing a global crisis an economic recession to understand the impact of this crisis on tourism it's necessary to understand the global impact of this crisis on the consumer himself , to begin with the subject let's do a quick analysis of the crisis:



The crisis can be considered as an illness, this illness started on the stock markets and the credit markets it was a result of a crash the financial system on which the actual economy is based collapsed , as a result all the investments made by people collapsed too then this illness extended and has now reached a global scale , the consumer is the first to suffer from the consequences of this crisis, jobs are being cut down, people get less wages and as a result the family's budget becomes more and more limited and people think twice when they want to have some fun.

Holidays are the primary source of amusement, so one question we can ask ourselves is:

What is the impact of this crisis on tourism?

My question implies that here is an impact what we will try to determine is how big this impact is we? re going to study it's consequences on the travel industry .

The crisis started in the United States and spread from there, now it is interesting to note that tourism in countries of northern Europe is registering an impact of the crisis, for example the countries of northern Europe are mostly visited by American and British tourists, because of the crisis the exchange rates of pound- euro, euro ?dollar are disadvantageous for British and American citizen.

It is interesting to note that the impact of this crisis aren't yet fully understood, measured because more data, more statistics needs to be gathered. But with the Data professionals have for now we can have a general idea of the consequences of this crisis.

Another impact of this crisis is purely and simply fear, lack of trust and panic, put all these factors together at a major scale and you will be able to paralyze, jeopardize any business any industry.

For instance the traveler is scared of being jobless because of the actual economic situation so he will not plan for any holidays and since there are many people in this situation it leads into a chaotic situation:

Airplane Ticket sales had decreased about 22% in January 2009 now with these number alone we can make a certain number of assumptions:

A decrease of ticket sales will lead in a loss for travel agencies since ticketing is their primary source of revenues, travel agents get their tickets from tour operators (see my article ?Tour operators: who are they??) so we can assume it will lead in a loss in the business of tour operators, and since tour operators sell packages often including transportation and lodging it will inevitably cause a loss in the hostelry business.

Here we can witness how devastating the crisis really is : ( and I'm talking about the travel industry only please consider that there are a countless number of other sectors that are touched too).

The consumer's insecurities had consequences on different sectors of the travel industry:

-Ticket sales

-Transportation

-Lodging

That being said I would also like to mention that unlike other industries tourism has witnessed, experienced crisis and should hopefully be able to counter the current situation.

One positive consequence of the crisis may be the following:

The crisis can allow companies to completely restructure, take new directions, new initiatives, in my opinion the crisis won't be over until trust is restored (people are just too scared to invest their money). But ultimately this crisis will come to an end and that is what companies should prepare for , the current situation is clearly disastrous and difficult but that doesn't mean that it can't be beneficial :

It gives companies time to prepare their next move bring on new projects and maybe rethink their strategies.

But they also have to survive the crisis first, and the government is the key to survive:

Let me explain my point of view , If a new touristic spot opens in a country thanks to this country's government, if the publicity is done accordingly, I mean if people are curious enough to go see for themselves then business could go up not only for the country in itself but also for hotels, restaurants inside this country.

And what tool is more powerful than Internet to do the publicity of such a project on an international scale?

This crisis is the first after the apparition of the web, the web which offers a tremendous choice for the consumer, the web offers multiple alternatives (low cost holidays for example is a perfect parade

As a conclusion I would like to say that the crisis is gradually bringing down the world's economic system and the tourism, the travel industry are a part of this economic system but to face today's crisis we have a weapon that was not yet discovered at the time of other crisis: The Internet it will of course not solve the world's problem but if it is used efficiently it can help a business survive and that especially in the tourism industry.

An article by Mon Hotel