Absorb, Adapt, or Transform? An Exploratory Analysis of Small Tourism Businesses’ Resilience Strategies During the Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been met by a number of responses that appear to be binary in their positions. From the perspective of the tourism industry, the prevailing discourse emphasizes words such as ‘recovery’, ‘innovation’, ‘bounce back’, where the thrust of the discussion is on supporting through policy and fiscal measures the recommencement of businesses, usually large, that comprise the tourism supply sectors. For more radical tourism academics, the pandemic has been heralded as ‘a time to reform and do tourism differently’. This question of the how of resilience has to some extent been addressed in the context of large businesses and destinations, with much less work being done with respect to small tourism businesses, despite their central role in advancing economic empowerment, innovation, and social cohesion in destinations. This study therefore proposes to fill this gap. Using resilience as the conceptual framework and drawing upon semi-structured interview data, this chapter examines the effects of the pandemic on small tourism businesses (STBs) in St. Lucia and Tobago, and the nature and type of the resilience response strategies (absorptive, adaptive, transformative) that have been employed by them to cope with the socio-psychological and economic effects of the pandemic. Overall, the study found that the majority of businesses employed adaptive resilience strategies and were therefore more concerned about ‘bouncing back’ from the effects of the pandemic. It is suggested that this position is a combination of the national posture on preserving the industry and the lower transaction costs associated with making adjustments necessary for business survival.