Responsible Recovery from COVID-19: An Empirical Overview of Tourism Industry

Over the past few decades, the world has seen a stunning transformation of the tourism industry. The tourism industry is one of the world's largest and fastest growing economic sectors. Thus, it is one of the key economic drivers in most developed and developing countries. Despite the rapid growth of the tourism industry, it is considered a vulnerable industry because it must accommodate the demand changes of tourists, shifts in economic environmental and other unexpected factors such as natural disasters and crises, especially the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this paper aims to review the key determinants affecting tourism demand. In general, the tourist arrivals and tourism receipts have been chosen to proxy tourism demand in the existing literatures. In modelling tourism demand model, the independent variables consist of f income level of the tourists, tourism price, exchange rate, transportation cost, word of mouth and other key parameters. Various techniques such as ARDL, Markov-switching, and panel analysis have been utilized in previous studies to investigate the dynamic relationship between the variables in tourism demand model. The recent outbreak, COVID-19 is leaving tremendous impacts to the world economy, especially the tourism industry. In sum, the research on pre-crisis, mid-crisis, and post-crisis are equally important in gathering information for future tourism recovery and development plans.