Struggling to move: The effects of COVID-19 and the radical transformation of tourism, Argentina as a case study

ABSTRACT

At the end of December 2019, a new virus outbreak baptized by scientists as COVID-19 (SARS-CoV2) paralyzed global commerce generating millionaire losses in the world. The virus was rapidly disseminated to the western cities through international travel and the tourism industry, a problem which led governments to cancel international flights while closing the airspace. The WHO (World Health Organization) recommended energetically the imposition of strict lockdowns and keeping social distancing as two valid forms to mitigate the pandemic. In the question of months, the virus wreaked havoc in the main economies of the world grinding the tourism and hospitality industries to an unparalleled halt. To put things straight, to date, more than 37 million people have been infected and one million have perished. Afrgentina, a southern Latin American country, which adopted a stricter and longer lockdown in the beginning, was gradually escalating to seventh place in the number of infected people (894.206) seconded by Peru and France. The socio-economic effects of COVID-19 on the tourism industry are not only manifold and complex but also denote a multifaceted dynamic. While some voices have alerted on the urgency to develop more resilient and eco-friendly forms of consumption, others have emphasized the need of changing the current research towards multidisciplinary methods. In the pre-pandemic days, tourists were valorized as an ambassador of "civilization," real global knights widely admired and objects of curiosity while nowadays tourists are negatively seen as potential enemies or carriers of a mortal disease, so to speak widely feared and demonized as never before. In this context, the present chapter discusses conceptually the effects and changes of the tourism industry in Argentina, particularly but with some broad strokes that illustrate the ways the industry is changing in the world. © 2023 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.