Do Terrorists Deter Tourists?

German Christmas markets, French concert venues, British stadiums, and Tunisian beach fronts draw thousands of visitors from across the world. In the last five years, all of these sites have also been visited by tragedy when terrorists staged attacks designed to kill en masse in each destination. This is, sadly, a global phenomenon. Even though terror attacks are declining in frequency, tourist destinations continue to be targeted. It could be suggested then that international tourists will seek to visit ostensibly safe destinations where they feel their personal security will not be threatened. As a result, policy makers may be concerned that terror attacks may further threaten domestic tourism industries. Will tourists feel visiting the country is no longer safe following an attack? Policy makers must now consider how severely a terrorist attack might discourage international tourism and how governments might be able to encourage foreigners to visit.

Scholars are also beginning to think through these issues, and a recent study has encouraging news. Anyu Liu and Stephen Pratt of Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Hotel and Tourism Management recently argued that, globally, terrorism creates “only a limited short run impact on international tourism.” They note that existing literature focuses primarily on case studies that produced inconsistent findings, whereas Liu and Pratt’s more comprehensive study considers data on tourism demand and terrorism from 95 countries. In this larger sample, they find that even the most deadly attacks rarely have a significant impact on a country’s industry. Instead, individual attacks appear to not dissuade tourists from visiting, and sustained, frequent attacks only slightly discourage tourism.

Liu and Pratt show that even terrorist attacks with very high death counts usually only have a short-term effect on tourism. For example, while the September 11th attacks caused a nearly three percent decline in U.S. tourism the following year, the industry quickly recovered to its growth path by 2004. This demonstrates that “tourism demand can recover even after a catastrophic shock.” Beyond this case study, the authors also built a regression model that found that a global increase in terrorist activity caused only a slight decrease in tourism worldwide. The model relies on data from The Institute for Economics and Peace to assess the amount of terrorist activity in each country, described by the Institute’s Global Terrorism Index (GTI) score. Liu and Pratt found that a one percent increase in GTI only decreases tourism demand by .015 percent in the short run, and even less in the long run. Only nine countries saw a more substantial decrease in tourism, and each of these states (including, for example, Syria, Yemen, and Colombia) had several attacks occur within five years. This suggests that terrorism is only a drag on tourism if there are frequent attacks.

This research has counterintuitive implications for policy makers. Even dramatic terror attacks that make international headlines do not damage tourists’ perception of a country for very long. These findings suggest the tourism industry may not need much support from the government to recover after an attack, as many previous studies have suggested. In fact, one study found that low and middle-income countries experience a short-term increase in tourism after a terror attack. Therefore, policy makers should resist the temptation to mount a publicity campaign to repair a country’s international image for tourists. Instead, resources could be dedicated to securing and protecting tourist destinations from terrorism.

Article source: Anyu Liu and Stephen Pratt, “Tourism’s Vulnerability and Resilience to Terrorism.” Tourism Management 60, (2017).

Featured photo: cc/(KapturePhotoSolution, photo ID: 616006334, from iStock by Getty Images)