An Analysis of the Enablers and Barriers to a Tourism Destination’s Resilience: A Case of the Erongo Region in Namibia

Abstract

Destination resilience is emerging as an important concept in the tourism management literature. This is because of the recognition that tourism needs strategies to cope with future shocks. The tourism disruptions caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the frequent occurrence of climatic disasters globally have made this need more apparent. Against this background, this study sought to analyse the enablers and barriers to tourism destination resilience in a post-Covid-19 Namibia. Data were collected in 2022 in the Erongo Region, which is one of Namibia’s key tourism destinations, and it was also a major Covid-19 pandemic hotspot. A stratified cluster random sampling approach was used to collect data from towns that were grouped into three tourism strata: Tourism accommodation, tour operators, and tourism-related characteristic industry. The study identified several key enablers for resilience. At the individual level, these enablers include intelligence and academic ability, social competence, and self-efficacy. For enterprise resilience, the study findings underscored the importance of having management and staff that are imbued with self-determination to adapt, and the skills to deal with future changes, as well as the ability to collaborate. In terms of community resilience, the important enabling factors were the level of infrastructure construction, access to resources, and the presence of innovative tourism marketing and local people’s traditional environmental knowledge. The major barriers to destination resilience were, namely, unprofessional customer service, lack of security infrastructure, insufficient investment in the sector, high tax on tourism products and lack of proper amenities. Given these findings, this paper contributes to the nascent literature on tourism disaster and crisis management in Namibia. It also draws research attention to the importance of small tourism and hospitality businesses as a pathway to foster more resilient businesses in the face of possible future shocks. The study recommends the establishment of appropriate tourism policies that are pivotal to building destination resilience, building capacity to plan and anticipate future changes and investing in durable infrastructure that can withstand economic disruptions and climate-induced shocks.

Keywords

• destination resilience
• enablers
• barriers
• covid-19
• micro-tourism businesses
• micro-hospitality businesses