Global Tourism Risk Index
The Global Tourism Risk Index measures risk exposure in the travel and tourism industry.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted vulnerabilities in systems, supply chains, and entrenched practices. The travel and tourism sectors were key vectors in the spread of infectious disease and various forms of lockdown limited human mobility as a primary defense mechanism. This helped expose the systemic risks of an industry that accounts for as much as 10% of global GDP. On the cusp of the pandemic in 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary shortlisted overtourism as a word of the year. That is, too many people were traveling, with cascading negative impacts. One constancy between the poles of overtourism and lockdown is the recognition that travel and tourism are risk laden activities that encompass global systems, articulated in travel destinations.
This research is centered on developing an index that we deploy as an analytic lens to measure the degree of exposure to risk in the travel and tourism industrial complex. Assessing tourism risk at multiple scales and across destinations is accomplished through inter-disciplinary, qualitative and quantitative analysis. The Global Tourism Risk Index (GTRI) that measures economic, social, ecologic, cultural, and political risks.
The outcomes of this project are threefold: 1) the development of the Global Tourism Risk Index; 2) the development of a public facing platform that will publish yearly updates to the GRTI 3) the production of student-led case studies and faculty-led publications.
Follow this link to a presentation on the Global Tourism Risk Index presented at the 1st Sustainable Travel and Tourism Seminar @ TTRC, Dec 1, 2022.