This opinion piece argues the need for researchers to shift to resilience rather than crisis management research in tourism studies. While the two concepts are inherently linked, existing studies prioritize the latter rather than the former. Also, a strong focus on disasters as the backdrop for resilience research in tourism is highlighted. I argue that both fast and slow paced changes that impact the tourism system and conceptual issues with respect to concepts such as destination resilience must be studied. I highlight several gaps in the tourism literature on resilience and offer avenues for further research. Specifically, the need for research on destination resilience, psychological resilience, employee resilience and organizational resilience is emphasized.

The unprecedented rise in the number of disasters and crises affecting the tourism industry worldwide has brought forth the importance of resilience building in the tourism industry. While tourism researchers are devoting much attention to crisis management, it is perhaps now the opportune time to question the relationship between crisis and disaster management, and resilience. Inherently crises are different from disasters with the latter implying a situation where there is severe loss of life and long-term damage to the society (Boin & McConnell, 2007; Hall, 2010). As such, the scale of an event, its character, and the vulnerability of a system prior to an event are important issues that must remain at the forefront of any resilience or crisis management thinking in tourism studies. There is a tendency for researchers to view crisis management as a holistic process involving prevention, planning, response, recovery and learning. These phases are not static and clearly identifiable as implied (Boin & McConnell, 2007). Far too often, the plans do not work, the recovery takes longer than anticipated, and the learning for individuals, organizations and communities is minimal. This does not mean that planning and processes put in place by organizations, communities and destinations as part of crisis management are not useful. To the contrary, there is still much to learn from crisis management given the well documented cases of how crises have been dealt with effectively because of roles and responsibilities were clearly allocated, evacuation plans were spot on, and resources were deployed effectively etc. The argument I am making in this opinion piece is that crisis and disaster management is necessary but not sufficient for advancing knowledge on how communities, organizations and destinations plan for, cope with, and recover from events that are increasingly larger in magnitude and having significantly more profound socio-economic and environmental impacts on individuals and societies. By ‘events’ I mean disasters rather than crises but as will be argued later, it is important to emphasize that resilience is not necessarily linked to only disasters and crises, and has a much wider application. Resilience is a term that finds its meaning in relation to change (Hall, Prayag, & Amore, 2018) which can be extraordinary or incremental and cumulative while crisis management is often linked to change that result from extraordinary circumstances. One of the great difficulties in understanding and responding to change is the rate at which change occurs (Hall et al., 2018). Individuals, organizations and communities have to deal with both incremental and sudden change. Therefore, ideas of resilience are related not only to change but also to stability and response (Holling, 1973).