ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has impacted the events, tourism, and hospitality industries throughout most parts of the world, prompting the need for empirical work to explore the perspectives and responses of indus-try stakeholders towards the pandemic. To characterize how managers in this space evaluated the impacts of the pandemic and the associated response system(s) and learning stories, in-depth inter-views with N = 24 senior event and tourism managers in Iran were conducted. The findings revealed that COVID-19 was a complex external crisis that significantly fueled other internal crises, impact-ing the complex event and tourism system. The data revealed that understanding the full effects of the pandemic depends on how sufficiently Iranian stakeholders acquired knowledge of the virus and the scope of its outcomes on the layered event and tourism system. The profound structural and transformational changes to this system necessitate the call for a uniform, coevolving responses from multiple events, tourism, sport, and associated management/industrial sectors. Adaption to the new normal and transformational opportunities were recommended by interviewees as influential strate-gies extracted from crisis lessons learned.
ABSTRACT
Quarantine hotels have been established by governments to accommodate COVID-19 infected or potentially infectious guests. The employees of these hotels, despite the high-risk environment, must provide services to guests. However, limited research is conducted on the impacts of the pandemic on their psychological well-being and health. This study investigates the protection motivation of quarantine hotel employees, fear of infection, coping strategies and behavioural intentions towards guests. A sample of 242 respondents in designated quarantine hotels in Iran revealed that fear of infection significantly affects employees' protection motivation intention. Employee psychological resilience is greatly affected by different coping strategies. The findings indicate that untact hospitality can significantly be increased by the protection intentions of hotel employees. Cautious contact with guests is also significantly increased by protection motivation intention and employees' psychological resilience. The results offer both theoretical and practical implications.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a dramatic loss of human lives worldwide and presented an unprecedented challenge to public health, tourism and community relations. Previous research on the relationship between xenophobia and travel behavior is limited, especially in the context of concerns over potential contagion. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between xenophobia and travel behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic in a sample of 489 Iranian travelers participated in survey conducted online. The results demonstrated that xenophobia positively correlates with the fear of COVID-19, travel risk perception, untact tourism, and travel precautions, although it is negatively correlated with the intention to undertake outbound and domestic travel. The relationships between push and pull factors to xenophobia were found insignificant. Interestingly, a significant difference between genders in the relationship between travel risk perception and xenophobia was identified. The study presents significant theoretical and practical implications and offers new avenues for future research. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.