Travel To Disaster Management Mechanism To Build

As a comprehensive industry that integrates food service, accommodations, transportation, touring, shopping and recreation, tourism industry has a substantial impact on a variety of social and economic fields. The tourism destination sustains a high proportion of the tourism activities. It has its geographic boundaries, within which the different components of the industry interact with one another as a consolidated system. As destinations are extremely sensitive to any internal and external changes, crisis management is of great importance to the improvement of the anti-disaster ability and enhancement of the image of a safe travel destination.The construction of a chaos model of tourism system and the model's explanation of the system will enable us to better understand reasons of tourism vulnerability and the importance of crisis management at a tourism destination. The major players within the tourism system can be grouped into seven parities: visitors, host community, tourism communication vector, tourism-related organizations, tourism-related externalities, non-tourism-related externalities and chaos maker, all of which are both independent and interactive.The survey on people's consciousness of crisis management in China has confirmed the necessity of building up the disaster management mechanism for tourism destinations. Regardless of differences in age, profession and education experience, most of the respondents agree that crisis management should be executed, especially at tourism destinations. However, as for the cognition of crisis management, the result of the survey is disappointing: only a few enterprises have a related management system and few people have ever had a training of disaster management skills. Thus, it is critical to develop a framework of destination crisis management to regulate the disaster management at all kinds of travel destinations.The framework of disaster management mechanism at tourism destinations the author builds is based on the chaos model of tourism system. It consists of two parts: in advance control & start-up mechanism (IACSM) and disaster management plan. IACSM is to inform the disaster managers how to collect effective information, execute monitoring, and start the special management plan at proper time. The crisismanagement plan is drawn with help from experts using the Delphi method. It integrates the responsibilities concerning disaster management of each major component within the tourism system and serves as a framework that can be consulted by different destinations when developing a detailed disaster plan for their specific hazards.Examined against the framework the author presents, the measures that the Chinese government, tourist trade associations and individual businesses took against SARS still have room for improvement.