Is it safe to travel there? Safety and preparedness for travellers

BY MICHAEL THOMAS

Delegates at the fourth Global Resilience Summit in London were told that countries are improving when it comes to handling the fallout of political unrest and terrorist actions, but according to experts the established model for crisis preparation and recovery is now severely outdated.

The annual event is organized by the Global Travel and Tourism Resilience Council and is set up to share best practices within the public and private sectors.

According to a report  presented by Gloria Guevera, Chief Executive of the World Travel & Tourism Council,  the average time for a nation to recover from political unrest has fallen from 22 months in the recent past to just 10 months in 2019, but the average recovery rate following terrorist activity is typically eight weeks, she added, however, Kirsi Madi, Director of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction urged governments and tourism-related businesses to work together to update older models and ensure they are fit for purpose. She called on all stakeholders to proactively plan their crisis response by understanding the risks they are exposed to and identifying effective risk-reduction strategies.

Madi also reminded delegates of a UNDRR initiative known as the SENDAI Framework, which recognize that states should play the main role in reducing disaster risk, but responsibility should be shared with other stakeholders.

The four priorities of the initiative are as follows.

• Understanding disaster risk
• Strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster
• Investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience
• Enhancing disaster preparedness for an effective response

The Resilience Council was founded following the success of the International Travel and Tourism Crisis Management Summit, which hosted its first event in London in 2016. ITCMS grew from the 2016 Summit, becoming a yearly event and paving the way for regional efforts that started with the Resilience Through Tourism Summit, held in Amman, Jordan in 2018.  These events benefit all sectors of the travel and tourism industry ranging from aviation to tour operators and destinations, to providing valuable real-time advice and information through comprehensive partnership programs. The goal of the RC is to engage with not just the corporate travel and tourism industry, but the leisure sector as well, proactively partnering with industry suppliers in order to become the quintessential resilience strategy platform which leads to enhancing the confidence of travelers globally and sustainable stakeholder resiliency.

Laurie Myers who is the Project Leader for The Resilience Council spoke with Toronto Caribbean Newspaper all the way from Athens, Greece where she was at the time. When asked how prepared should travelers be in case of a crisis, Myers said, “As a traveler, the first thing you should do is to be aware of your destination where you are traveling; get to know things like what is normal in that culture. The responsibility is also yours to make sure your destination has been identified as being resilient. Hotels and airlines are proactively trying to establish sustainable practices and preparedness for any event.”

She added, “There is a certain amount of sharing that goes across the board in this whole sector, it is not solely the responsibility of the government, the businesses nor the destination, therefore, he or she should do their research. Nepal is a good example; they went through the 2015 earthquake and had their issues with Mount Everest: they are constantly talking about it, constantly reorganizing their travel community around the subject matter and developing experiences to redirect tourism away from over-populated areas.”

The Resilience Council Project Leader had a message for some governments who are not including the travel and tourism sector into their risk and preparedness planning, “With the travel and tourism sector being 10.5% of the global GDP and representing one in ten jobs around the planet, they should be at the table when we do any of our planning, because that is where we are going to see our recovery first.”

To the travelers, Myers had a final word of advice, “Align your destination with your values.”

More information on the Resilience Council can be found at https://www.resiliencecouncil.org/resiliencecouncil/en/page/home