Tourism and War by Suntikul Wantanee. Butler Richard

Author:Suntikul, Wantanee.,Butler, Richard.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Regionally Differential Impact of war and Violence

Although Israel is territorially a small country, not all of it has been equally impacted by war and terror. For instance, Jerusalem was a preferred target for Palestinian terror, including the acts of suicide bombers sent to blow themselves up in busy streets or passenger buses (see Isaac, this volume, for a Palestinian perspective on tourism during this period). Yet, the Holy City has not suffered from the impact of wars or missiles since 1967. On the other hand, northern Galilee used to be an area targeted frequently by missiles from Lebanon. Nowadays, despite the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, a wide radius of cities, towns, and villages around Gaza Strip has become a target of rockets and missile shelling by Hamas. This last region, however, is poorly endowed with tourist attractions.

The resort city of Eilat at the southernmost tip of Israel used to be a safe haven and it was no wonder that this resort city on the shores of the Red Sea became the site of the single largest concentration of hotel rooms in the country, surpassing the number of hotel rooms in Jerusalem (Krakover 2004; Israel 2011b). In order to eliminate the fear factor and to avoid the negative image created by wars and terror events, Eilat’s resort was internationally advertised as a destination on the Red Sea disassociated with Israel (Avraham 2008: 22). Another flourishing resort area is located on the western shores of the Dead Sea (Karplus and Krakover 2005), an area which has never been a site of terror atrocities.

In reality, very few tourists have been hurt by war skirmishes or terrorism while visiting Israel. The risk of being a victim of such an event is much lower than being involved in a car accident. Nevertheless, once the various media sources alert potential tourists to any violent events taking place in Israel, few tourists examine the map of Israel and most generally refrain from taking a trip to any place in the country. Fortunately, the urge for visiting is so strong that travelers tend to overlook or ignore the threat of war and terror fairly rapidly after these events are over (Mansfeld 1999; Pizam and Smith 2000; Krakover 2005). The impact of severe but rare adverse events was found to be less devastating to the tourism industry than smaller but more frequent ones (Pizam and Fleischer 2002).

In the long run, the Israeli tourism industry seems to have been coping successfully with the problematic and most often unpredictable declines in the flow of foreign tourists as a result of adverse events. Various strategies have been advised in order to minimize the impact of war and terror events on the tourism sector (Beirman 2002). One such strategy is an invitation to domestic travelers to substitute for any decrease in the number of the foreign visitors (Fleischer and Bocculla 2002). Local citizens are far better aware of the regional distribution of risks and their temporal duration than foreigners relying on often unreliable or inaccurate media reports.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.