RISKS, VULNERABILITY AND PARADOXES OF TOURISM

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to present an analysis of the scenario for tourism after the inexorable outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus around the world. The examination is carried out from a critical epistemology, to address the paradoxes inherent to tourism as a social construct and propositional before the ubiquitous invocation of a transformation considered urgent and inescapable. However, the question is whether the necessary prerequisites are in place for this transformation to materialize. The latent risk of a global pandemic had been hinted at on several occasions until it finally crystallized from the first quarter of 2020, spreading progressively and resulting in an unusual scenario of quasi-apocalyptic planetary dimensions. Tourism has shown, once again, its vulnerability as a system subject to multiple internal and external contingencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has been the sudden trigger for an implosion that reveals the tourist phenomenon as an idol with feet of clay. It has shown us with hyperrealistic fidelity that "tourism", even supported by a powerful multisectoral and globalized industry, lacks reagents and gears to face similar attacks. This leads us to conclude the need to rethink the current tourism model, eliminating its contradictions, and formulate a new post-pandemic paradigm that provides it with greater coherence. Likewise, it is necessary to rework and reorient the different narratives so that they converge in a discourse that is distinguished by its performative stamp. For this catharsis to occur, the industry will have to ask itself whether it is willing to rigorously follow sustainability guidelines to avoid, or at least reduce the consequences of future crises. Also society, and each one of us, as potential tourists, will have to ask ourselves what we have learned and how we will contribute to the regeneration of tourism.