Tourism is vulnerable and sensitive to natural, socio-political, and economic hazards. The bulk of destinations are threatened by natural, terrorist, cyclical, epidemiological, political, and social perils. Tourism is a salient industry and represents 14% of the GDP of certain MENA countries, including Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt. The latter's GDP has shrunk sharply and affected other vital economic sectors that inductively and deductively rely on tourism. Generally, the industry's recovery depends, to a large extent, on these governments' decision-makers alongside the encouragement and satisfaction of the tourist.
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Traveling is a vital activity that enables the tourist to discover new cultures and settings. The traveler seeks a safe and entertaining destination void of crimes, illness and disasters to meet new people and explore other places (Kuschel & Schröder, 2002). However, some tourists visit countries featured by the proliferation of pandemics and epidemics and contribute to their spread in their original countries (Hollingsworth, Ferguson, & Anderson, 2006). The world, nowadays, suffers from the aftermaths of Covid-19 with international travel bans in most countries and strict social distancing measures to mitigate the proliferation of the virus that has affected 90% of the population (Grech et al., 2020). The world has to endure the impacts of the economic losses as the revenues of the tourism industry will drop by 80% in 2020 (WTO, 2020) and will continue to shrink in the forthcoming years as the world economy needs years to recover (Broom, 2020). UNWTO (2020) suggests that the workforce in the tourism industry, along with other sectors, has severely been hit by the epidemic as one in 10 of the labors and workers in the industry is threatened to be unemployed (Broom, 2020).
Grech (2020) suggests that fierce competition between tourist destinations will be the norm in the forthcoming months and years due the economic crisis and the lack of tourists. Serrano and Kazda (2020) demonstrate that the tourist offers of the companies and the safety of the destination are crucial factors that will attract the attention of the tourist. Crises often occur in this industry as many destinations witness natural and human-made disasters such as hurricanes, floods, landslides, etc., (Dolnicare & zare, 2020) and decision-makers have improved strategies to weather the negative impacts of catastrophes on the tourism industry (Ritchie & Jiang, 2019). Nevertheless, the developed strategies considered merely partial decline and did not take into account a world-wide pandemic that has demolished the pillars of economy in the majority of countries (UNWTO, 2020b).
Some studies shed light on the effects of viruses and epidemics on tourism (Ritcher, 2003), especially after the dissemination of SARS in several Asian countries including China, Taiwan and Singapore (Mackey & Liang, 2012). Hilsenrath (2020) indicates in his study that urbanization and globalization are major factors that contribute the dissemination of pandemics and epidemics and that the tourist is a salient means of infection. Other studies highlighted the effects of natural disasters on tourism, in general, and on the country, in particular (Sio-Chong & So, 2020; Song, Livat, & Ye, 2019). Prior to the proliferation of the pandemic, few studies have shed light on the impacts of crises on the local community (Sharifpour et al., 2014) while the focus in most of the studies was on tourists and their consuming behavior (Song et al., 2009).