From SARS through Zika and up to Covid-19: destination recovery marketing campaigns in response to pandemics

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has altered the paradigm of risk and recovery management but it is just one of many pandemics to have impacted destinations during the last two decades. This study examines how destination officials combated the image crises that followed SARS-2003, H1N1 Swine flu 2009–2010, Zika 2016–2017 and Covid-19 2020. The literature dealing with combating pandemics has focused on the actual management of either a specific pandemic or regional aspects of a pandemic and less on the recovery marketing and image repair aspect. As a result, tourism academic literature has a shortage of image repair theoretical frameworks addressing multi-case health-related crises. In this study, we use qualitative content analysis of news reports, websites and recovery campaigns taken from media outlets, tourism news websites, Google search engine and YouTube, over the past two decades. This paper posits a new theoretical framework: six-phase image repair strategies during pandemics.