Tourism Risk and Uncertainty

Abstract

The analysis of risk in tourism is fragmented and uneven and focuses relatively narrowly on risk as a set of negative outcomes to be avoided by individuals, firms, or destinations. This article contends that, because of general, and sector-specific, limitations to knowledge, systematic and unsystematic risks are central to all forms of tourism activities. There is a need for a stronger theoretical understanding of the different concepts of tourism risks and tourism uncertainties that engages with how these are manifested at different scales, and can be analyzed from competing perspectives. The contribution and potential of both rationalist and constructivist approaches are assessed, focusing on individuals, firms, intermediaries, and destinations. The article concludes by identifying priorities for future research relating to both theoretical positioning and scale-specific issues ranging from individual decision making to the securitization of national tourism policies.

Keywords

risk uncertainty knowledge behavior policy discourse

Introduction

Tourism is generally associated with pleasure and leisure activities, and risk mostly is seen as something to be avoided, or perhaps simply as lurking beneath the surface, an ever-present potential threat. It may occasionally blight the experiences, and sometimes the lives, of individual tourists, but is not central to tourism. Indeed, risk is essentially seen as the antipathy of pleasure, and mass pleasure-seeking tourism in particular is constructed on the apparent absence of risk. For example, Buchholtz (1983) describes how, for the expanding, white middle classes of North America in the nineteenth century, the Rocky Mountains were transformed—or, more accurately, socially reconstructed—from being a dangerous and risky wilderness to being a desirable playground.

Risk has been acknowledged, of course, in tourism studies, and there has been growing interest in the risks associated with various forms of disasters (Sönmez and Graefe 1998), and with health risks whether for the individual tourist or the liabilities of the tourism service providers (Cartwright 2000). There is also increased interest in “risk-seeking,” or at least “risk-tolerant,” adventure tourism (Swarbrooke et al. 2003), as the numbers of high-risk takers seem to increase in tourism (Cater 2006). But tourism risks tend to be understood through an exceptionalist perspective, where risks impinge upon the “normal” state of pleasure-seeking tourism, implicitly free from (negative) risks. It is an exceptionalism which is contributed to by the tourism industry and boosterist tourism policies. As Cohen (2009, pp. 183–84) notes, the industry avoids dealing openly with death and danger, and “in the popular imagination, death and tourism belong to utterly different spheres of life,” although the increasingly rapid global distribution of images of tourism disasters via the Internet are challenging this.

In contrast to such exceptionalism, the article advances two arguments. First, risk and uncertainty are inherent to, and provide lenses for deepening understanding of, tourism. Risk and uncertainty are essentially about the limits of knowledge that are inherent in tourism as in any activity. However, the particular nature of the sector means there are additional twists to risk and uncertainty in tourism stemming from crossing borders and “tacit knowledge terrains,” the complex nature of the tourism experience, and the impossibility of storing unsold tickets and unoccupied accommodation. There is also a high degree of vulnerability to unsystematic exogenous risks such as natural and sociopolitical disasters. Consequently, tourism is infused with risk, at every scale from the individual, through the group to the destination and national scales. But we know relatively little about most of these scales, or how they are interconnected;, for example, how popular discourses about risk (Cohen 2010) mediate individual perceptions of risk (Kozak, Crotts, and Law 2007), and how the latter differ from the understanding of risk embedded in firms’ risk management strategies (Ritchie 2004).

Second, although there has been growing research on risk in recent years, risk and uncertainty remain undertheorized or, at best, subject to fragmented theorization. It is, unsurprisingly, a multidisciplinary rather than an interdisciplinary meeting ground, where researchers often talk at each other, rather than with each other. Not least there is a major cleavage between theories that understand risk as objectified and real versus socially constructed (Zinn and Taylor-Gooby 2006), as Cunliffe (2006) notes in relation to sustainable tourism. This article therefore aims to provide a general theoretical canvas for the analysis of risk and uncertainty in tourism that, even if it cannot reconcile fundamentally different conceptualizations of risk, will allow researchers to situate individual studies of tourism risk within this broader theoretical picture, albeit of competing theories.

These two arguments—the centrality of risk across different scales and the need to more specifically theorize risk—structure the remainder of this article. It begins by considering the relationships between knowledge and risk/uncertainty because how we theorize risk depends on how we understand the nature of knowledge. It then focuses mainly on the dominant rationalist approaches to risk, starting with the individual scale, before proceeding through networks, groups, and intermediaries, to the societal scale. This is followed by a shorter commentary on alternative constructionist approaches. We focus on international tourism, where risk issues are often amplified, although many arguments also apply to domestic tourism

Knowledge, Risk, and Uncertainty

A central premise about risk is that this begins where knowledge ends. When a tourist buys a flight, or books accommodation, a risk is necessarily attached—they are buying intangible services and tourism experiences that will only be experienced after they have been paid for (Boksberger and Craig-Smith 2006). The range of risks is immense—from having noisy neighbors in the room next to you, to food poisoning, poor weather, tsunamis, or riots. Firms are especially vulnerable to tourist perceptions of risk, because tourism expenditure is discretionary and tourists can defer a planned holiday, or substitute a less risky holiday destination. In fact, firms face a range of risks: from the “normal” operating risks relating to competition, production, and distribution, that is, systematic risks, to the extraordinary unsystematic risks posed by exogenous events, whether a global economic crisis, a military coup, or an earthquake. In short, risk exists because we can never have perfect knowledge of the future, although the degree of uncertainty is highly variable across destinations and activities.

Tourism is also subject to distinctive sources of risks due to the “intangible and experiential nature of tourism” (Sirakaya and Woodside 2005, p. 816). In common with migration (Williams and Baláž 2012), it involves traveling from familiar places that we have personal or tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966) of, to unfamiliar places about which we have less tacit knowledge. In other words, there is greater uncertainty than in local leisure decision making in the individual’s home area because of tacit knowledge differences. Polanyi’s (1966) concept of tacit knowledge has been deconstructed by later researchers, who, among other forms, identified embedded and encultured knowledge (Blackler 2002). Knowledge of cultures and institutions are informed by tacit or personal knowledge and this is particularly germane for tourists visiting unfamiliar places. For example, Cohen (2009), writing about deaths on holiday, contends that these pose challenges for friends and family because they occur in strange physical, cultural, and social surroundings—in other words, in places where they have little embedded and encultured knowledge. The interface between knowledge and risk also informs novelty versus familiarity seeking among tourists (Cohen 1972).

Firms similarly face risk and uncertainty in operating beyond familiar areas they have substantial tacit knowledge of. The key issue in the internationalization of tourism firms, for example, is the simultaneity of production and consumption, from which flow two main consequences (Williams and Shaw 2011). First, if they do not rely on subcontracting (which has its own associated risks), firms that provide services directly to tourists abroad operate in a cultural, political, and economic environment they have relatively limited tacit knowledge of and therefore face relatively higher risks and uncertainties. In part, this is similar to the risks faced by any transnational company producing or distributing goods and services abroad. But tourism is different in that the customers (tourists) may also be traveling abroad, and familiarity is particularly important for some market segments. This is one of the bases for the growth of transnational tourism firms—branded international hotels are essentially in the business of reproducing familiar or standardized services across international boundaries (Dunning and McQueen 1982), thereby reducing risks for consumers.

Of course, individual tourists and firms seek to minimize risk in a number of ways, including acquiring knowledge. This is particularly germane for tourists who tend to have semireliable memories of previous tourism experiences, distorted by post rationalization, as well as limited experience of most forms of tourism, because this is usually an infrequent form of consumption experience (Boksberger and Craig Smith 2006). Tourists’ risk management strategies include both information-related strategies and travel-specific strategies (Lo, Cheung, and Law 2011). The former includes seeking advice and information from tacit sources such as family and friends, or face-to-face meetings with travel agents, or codified sources such as websites and guide books, or a combination of these (Litvin, Crotts, and Hefner 2004). While such strategies may shift the boundary between knowledge and risk, they cannot eliminate risk and uncertainty. Firms also acquire tacit and codified knowledge in order to reduce risks. This covers both the internal operations of the firms, for which they may seek to harvest the knowledge of managers and workers, and external knowledge relating to the operating environment, for example when expanding into a new country. In the latter, they may initially operate in partnership with local firms that possess valued tacit knowledge, before subsequently investing in sole owned operations (Liesch et al. 2002). A similar relationship between tacit knowledge and risk informs Johanson and Vahlne’s (1977) “stage” model, which contends that, in the early stages of internationalization, firms invest in “psychically close” markets, in terms of culture, language, and business practices, that is, markets they have some encultured and embedded knowledge of.

So far we have referred to knowledge and risk in broad terms, while noting a basic division between positivist/objectivist and constructivist approaches. However, there are many different approaches even within the modernist conceptualization of risk (Camerer and Weber 1992). Knight (1921) made the most influential contribution, distinguishing between risk (known uncertainties) and uncertainty (unknown uncertainties). In the modernist tradition, with economics at the forefront, risk is seen as being real, objective and to have known probabilities of outcomes (Zinn 2004a). Therefore, a risky decision involves being faced with a range of possible outcomes, whose probabilities are known. In contrast, a decision made under conditions of uncertainty involves either lacking any reliable evidence about the probability of the outcomes, or even being unaware of some potential outcomes.

The classic example of risk is gambling on a roulette wheel where the probabilities of all outcomes are precisely known. There are some reliable estimates of probabilities in tourism, for example, for weather, crime, and health, especially for mass tourism, because of the enhanced reliability that stems from large statistical data sets: indeed, the tourism insurance industry is based on such probabilities. Whether individual tourists know such probabilities is questionable, and at best they may only have broad (and perhaps misleading) impressions of say the weather, or the chances of becoming ill or being robbed. Additionally, the tourism experience is also constituted of uncertainties, articulated at two scalar extremes. First, at the small scale, the individual tourist does not know the probabilities of whether there will be noisy tourists in the same hotel, or whether there will be conflicts within the traveling group. And although the tourism firm may have a broad understanding of the estimated demand for the next season, there is also uncertainty stemming from unexpected competition, or the movement of key staff (perhaps your Michelin garlanded chef) to a rival restaurant. Second, there are exogenous major sources of uncertainty, stemming from natural disasters such as earthquakes. Therefore, in tourism, as with most activities outside the controlled conditions of a laboratory or a casino, there is usually a mixture of uncertainty, and broadly known risks. The mixture of uncertainty versus risk is variable across space (between destinations) and time (as more knowledge is acquired about the destination, before and during the vacation). Rationalist decision making based on perfect knowledge is impossible under such conditions. Behavioralist researchers acknowledge these imperfections and consider that individuals use heuristics (decision-making shortcuts) to overcome these. In one of the few studies of tourism decision-making heuristics, Gray and Wilson (2009) contend that the availability heuristic is particularly important: the risk of an event is assessed according to the ease with which particular hazards are recalled and associated with particular destinations. Despite acknowledging these considerations, behavioralists believe that decision making is mostly a rationalist exercise based on the application of knowledge, albeit imperfect knowledge.

In contrast, postmodernists consider that knowledge is not made up of discrete categories and measurable, objective knowledge about the world. Instead, meanings are socially constructed, boundaries between phenomena are blurred, and knowledge is highly individualized, making it difficult to identify underlying generalizations. There are many competing theories of postmodernism, which essentially is defined in terms of a reaction to the limitations of modernism (Harvey 1989). Hassan’s (1985) schematic contrasting of modernism and postmodernism, for example, distinguishes between chance as opposed to design, deconstruction as opposed to totalization, intertext as opposed to distinct boundaries, and indeterminacy as opposed to determinacy. These are all arguments against what are considered to be the reductionist approaches of modernism to knowledge.

Styhre (2004, p. 185) argues that individuals combine both types of knowledge, applying both intellect and intuition to decision making, so that knowledge is “always an unstable, fluid, rather elusive capacity to know, to do, to think things.” Tourists may start out trying to accumulate knowledge and making rational decisions, but soon reach the limits of what they know, or is known. They therefore combine intellect with affective or emotional knowledge, and ultimately rely on instinct about the outcomes: “I feel rather than know that this will be a great holiday destination.” This raises the question of the extent to which individuals are aware of the impossibility of knowing—a subject that is still little researched in tourism. Tasci and Knutson (2004) contend that because destinations are unfamiliar, and have intangible attributes, tourists are likely to perceive the existence of risks (negative impacts) precisely because of their lack of knowledge of these. But that does not address the extent to which tourists are aware of their knowledge limitations. Entrepreneurs also face limits to their ability to acquire knowledge about, and rationally analyze, risks—ultimately, they also apply a mixture of intellect and intuition to decision making.

In summary, risk and knowledge are closely related. For the modernists, risk begins where knowledge ends and then shades into uncertainty when not even the probabilities of different outcomes are known, as typified by earthquakes and tsunamis. In contrast, postmodernists emphasize the blurring of meanings, the deeply cultural nature of understanding, and the impossibility of knowing in the positivist sense. At one level, both approaches recognize the imperfection of knowledge, and decision making. However, whereas modernists believe it is possible to develop more behaviorally informed and “realistic,” yet still fundamentally rationalist, models of decision making, postmodernists consider this futile. So how do individuals take decisions under such circumstances? Classical positivists assume away the nonrational, behavioralists look to the use of heuristics and seek to model actual behavior, while postmodernists emphasize the importance of muddling through, or relying on intuition, and emotion. The different theories also implicate trust, whether that which the consumer has in the brand or the entrepreneur has in the hand shake with a business partner, but they have contrasting ways of theorizing this.

Objective, Out-There Risk: Positivist and Behavioralist Approaches

Individual Tourists: Rational and Behavioralist Approaches

There is relatively little tourism research on individual behavior which is framed in terms of neoclassical models assuming rational decision making in response to perfect knowledge. Instead, tourism researchers recognize that individual tourists lack complete knowledge, lack experience in specific types of tourism purchases, and are sensitive to perceived exogenous, and increasingly widely reported, risks. Consequently, they have been influenced more by social psychology and behavioralist economics approaches that seek to analyze actual behavior and decision making, rather than neoclassical optimizing models. Tourism researchers have focused particularly on perceived risk, or how people understand the likelihood of negative events (Boholm 1996, pp. 64–65). There is an important difference here with how Knight (1921), and later the behavioral economists (Tversky and Kahneman 1974), understood risk as the probability of different outcomes, whether negative or positive; in contrast, risk perception studies mostly associate risk with negative outcomes (Pizam et al. 2004). The latter more closely accord with popular understanding of the notion of tourism risks (Kozak, Crotts, and Law 2007).

While tourism researchers have mostly focused on risk perception, much of the “mainstream” social science research on risk—notably in behavioral economics—has drawn on the work of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and associates on willingness to take risks, that is, on risk tolerance versus risk aversion. There are a few exceptions and, for example, Money and Crotts (2003) demonstrated a positive association between uncertainty avoidance and visiting fewer destinations, and traveling in organized tour groups. The most comprehensive application of Tversky and Kahneman’s concepts has been Williams and Baláž’s (2013) analysis of how both risk tolerance and competence to manage risks influence preferences for individual versus organized travel. They also examined how willingness to take risks mediates the extent to which specific hazards (exogenous risks such as tsunamis, or riots) deter tourists. A central theme is whether a general risk trait exists, making individuals consistently risk averse across all or most arenas of activity, such as driving or drinking (Barsky et al. 1997; Dohmen et al. 2005), or whether risk tolerance is domain specific because individuals having different competences to manage risks in particular domains: for example, having poor competence in financial investments, but strong competence in tourism as a result of extensive previous travel experience. The notion of competence highlights the centrality of the interface between knowledge and risk in objectivist or realist approaches. Although Williams and Baláž (2013) identified a statistical relationship between risk tolerance, the general risk trait, and willingness to take tourism risks, the causal relationship between risk tolerance and previous travel experience remains unclear: has travel experience made individuals risk tolerant, or was the initial predisposition to travel selectively influenced by risk tolerance?

Although the willingness to take risk approach is relatively neglected in tourism studies, there is a substantial literature on risk perceptions. Drawing on Bauer’s (1960) work on the individual’s feelings of uncertainty about the outcomes of a purchase, risk perception is understood in terms of how predetermined notions about particular places, objects, or activities, influence tourist behavior (Mansfeld 1996). This has produced several typologies of perceived risk, such as Sönmez and Graefe’s (1998), which identified financial, psychological, satisfaction, time, health, political instability, and terrorism risks as important deterrents to tourists. Reflecting changes in the external environment (increased, or increased awareness of, exogenous risks), recent research has focused more on safety and security issues (Poon and Adams 2000) and natural disasters (Lo, Cheung, and Law 2011). Levels of perceived risk also determine the amounts and types of information sought (Quintal, Lee, and Soutar 2010). This again highlights the knowledge–risk interface, but focusing here on perceptions of the risks, rather than competence to manage those risks. Risk perceptions are, of course, also linked to image formation (Kozak, Crotts and Law 2007).

The central question relating to perceived risks is how tourists respond to these, and research has been dominated by the differentiation between novelty- and familiarity-seeking behavior, a conceptualization rooted in Cohen (1972). Lee and Crompton (1992) further deconstructed novelty into four key components: thrill, change of routine, boredom alleviation, and surprise, the last of which relates to uncertainty. In general, the links between novelty/familiarity and risk/uncertainty have tended to be implicit rather than explicit in most research. However, two of the three distinctive characteristics of independent travelers identified by Hyde and Lawson (2003) are implicitly related to risk and uncertainty: willingness to take risks when making decisions about, and during, the holiday and a desire for unplanned experiences. Lepp and Gibson (2008) have also demonstrated that novelty-seeking tourists were less likely than organized mass tourists to perceive a range of issues to be risky, such as health, war, and petty crime. One of their more interesting findings is that previous tourism experiences are more likely to lead to both novelty- and familiarity-seeking tourists being more likely to consider such issues to be risky—but, as in behavioral economics, causality remains unresolved.

Another perspective on risk is provided by apparently “risk-seeking” tourists. This is not a new phenomenon, and can be dated back to at least the period of colonial explorations, while the Dangerous Sports Club of Oxford made an important contribution in the 1970s (Laviolette 2010). However, risk-seeking tourism has recently attracted considerable interest, especially relating to backpackers and adventure tourists. Elsrud (2001), for example, contends that risk and adventure are important to the identities of many backpackers, although there is a continuum of risks, from the moderately stimulating to the life-endangering. Adventure tourists are also seeking “risk and uncertainty of outcome” (Ewert 1989, p. 8), although more nuanced research indicates a greater concern for sensation than for risk (Cater 2006). This is an important distinction and, although Pizam et al. (2004) found strong positive correlations between risk perception and sensation seeking, they concluded that these are not identical constructs. Commodified adventure tourism, where risks are effectively minimized by tourism companies on behalf of the tourists (Bentley and Page 2008)—thereby effectively relocating risk management from the individual—essentially provides sensations rather than risks, although the latter can never be excluded.

While risk necessarily constitutes an important consideration in decision making, its role is still little understood beyond identifying which types of hazards deter individual tourists, and the extent to which this—and preference for individual versus organized tourism—are influenced by risk tolerance (see Silva, Reis and Correia 2010). Clearly risk provides no more than a partial explanation of complex tourism decision-making processes, and Williams and Baláž (2013) only explained a relatively small proportion of tourist behavior in their study. This highlights the need for more detailed research on decision making in the face of risk, and prospect theory offers one fruitful, risk-related theoretical perspective. Prospect theory asserts that individuals evaluate outcomes in terms not of absolute levels, but rather the deviation from a particular reference level (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). In tourism, that reference point can be previous or current experience of tourism; for example, “I had a good experience with this resort last year, I expect the same good experience this year.” Prospect theory also provides us with the notion of loss aversion, that individuals tend to be more sensitive to losses than to similar sized gains in utility. Loss aversion is also related to regret avoidance. Individuals may visit the same holiday resort every year because they fear that other resorts may provide less satisfactory tourism experiences. Gray and Wilson (2009) have identified the potential application of loss aversion in tourism decision making and, in one of the few empirical applications, Nicolau (2008) demonstrates loss aversion among Spanish tourists in relation to the reference prices they use in decision making.

Firms and Strategies to Engage with Risk: Knowledge, Diversification, Trust, and Insurance/Hedging

Tourism firms face the same two main sources of risk and uncertainty as individual tourists: that the future is unknowable, and having relatively limited tacit knowledge of other places. These are generic forms of risk faced by all businesses, but some elements are tourism specific. These include the enhanced potential importance of external shocks (such as natural hazards or riots) given the discretionary nature of tourism spending, while their mobile customers have limited tacit knowledge of most destinations. The difficulties of protecting tourism innovations from imitation by competitors also add to the risks, and transaction costs, of innovation (Hall and Williams 2008). And the “uno-actu-principle,” whereby the availability of supply is highly time specific, so that hotel beds or aircraft seats have to be sold for a particular time period and cannot be deferred (Weiermair 2006), also adds to the risks faced by tourism firms. These risks have intensified over time because of increasing media globalization, and the possibility of legal actions in increasingly litigious societies.

Concepts of risk in the finance services literature provide insights into tourism risks. The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) identifies two forms of risk faced by firms, unsystematic and systematic (Sharpe 1964; Van Horne 1998). Unsystematic risk stems from firm-specific events such as poor design or marketing, while systematic risk, which cannot be avoided, stems from market volatility due to exogenous hazards such as economic recessions, natural disasters, or political crises. This resonates with the lack of control that most tourism firms exercise over the tourist experience, which is shaped by a range of other actors and external events. For example, Lee and Jang (2007) demonstrate that airlines are highly vulnerable to systematic risks stemming from external factors they cannot control such as wars, tourism, or global economic crises. The two forms of risk are of course linked, and the capacity of a firm to respond to systematic risks is mediated by its exposure to unsystematic (or endogenous) risks. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong association between systematic risks and firm characteristics such as size, profitability, and debt leverage (Logue and Merville 1972). Firm size is particularly important in tourism, given the dominance of many subsectors by relatively small firms.

Firms have to engage with different types of risks on both a day-to-day and strategic basis. Although larger firms are likely to have specialized departments that, to varying degrees, seek to manage risks, these capacities can also be highly personalized in the individual entrepreneur. Baumol (2002, p. 58) wrote, “In the writings of the classical economist the appearance of this important figure was frequent but shadowy, without clearly defined form and function.” Schumpeter (1934) provided much of the early conceptualization of entrepreneurship but, as Te Velde (2004) notes, he seemed caught between seeing the entrepreneur as a heroic agent of change or as a more passive mechanism for implementing, externally driven changes. In the heroic vision, entrepreneurial firms are seen as being innovative and risk taking (Jogaratnam and Tse 2004, p. 250). Entrepreneurs are not only risk tolerant but exploit the opportunities created by risk—whereas other potential actors are deterred by these. These heroic, risk-taking figures, such as Thomas Cook, Richard Branson, or Marie Tussaud, were enormously influential in the evolution of tourism (Butler and Russell 2010).

Although the role of heroic entrepreneurs should not be ignored, most firms are involved in the less heroic practices of incremental innovation, and managing the risks associated with these and their day-to-day operations. Lee and Jang (2007, p. 55) capture something of this when writing about the uncertainty faced in product development: risk is considered acceptable “as long as it remains within a domain of tolerance (domain of performance, margin for contingencies, etc); here the notion of risk conflates with the possibility of egress from such a situation.” In other words, the risks are seen as quantifiable, up to a point, and manageable. There has been a growing tendency for firms to seek to manage risks formally—whether systematic or unsystematic—across the firm, both proactively and passively (Ritchie 2004). Here we contend there are four main strategies for managing risk at the firm level: acquiring and utilizing knowledge, trust, diversification, and insurance/hedging.

First, firms can seek to acquire knowledge about risks and how to manage them, from sources both within and external to the firm, and then apply this to their own operations, usually involving intraorganizational dissemination strategies. This explicitly recognizes the centrality of the knowledge–risk interface as Lee and Jang (2007, p. 56) note in relation to project design management: “the acquisition of knowledge required for the project can be affected by a host of malfunctions, including especially patchy knowledge in the field of technology watch or capitalisation on know-how . . . a dearth or conversely an excess of information available, the unreliable nature of that information or its non-synthetic nature.” These are generic issues of knowledge and risk management that apply to all the firm’s operations, and not only project design, and include knowledge of customers’ expectations, the supply side, the firm’s own operations, and external or systematic risks. A particular problem for tourism firms is the significance of systematic or exogenous risks that are difficult for them to acquire knowledge about or to predict, especially as widely-reported disasters can shape a tourist’s image of the firm or destination. This highlights the need for a firm’s risk management strategies to be based on an understanding of tourists’ risk tolerance and perceptions of risk, as integral to both marketing and operational strategies (Kim and Richardson 2003). But it also highlights limits to the extent to which firms can influence consumers’ perceptions of risk in the face of social media growth (Ward and Ostrom 2003).

The second strategy is to rely on developing trust-based relationships, particularly with other firms. Where knowledge ends, so risk begins, but it is also true that “trust begins where knowledge ends” (Lewis and Weigert 1985, p. 462). Firms rely on supply contracts or links with other firms, and there are always risks attached to whether these firms will pay on time, provide reliable products and services on time, and be financially solvent in future. If there is little “objective” knowledge about which suppliers or customers will be problematic suppliers in future, particularly when operating in an unfamiliar region or country, then firms may largely rely on trust in the face of uncertainty. Trust is difficult to measure, but economists conceptualize it as constituting a way of reducing the firm’s transactions cots (Anheier and Kendall 2002). Lowe et al. (2012) provide a case study of the importance of trust in the development of the UK boutique hotel group, Hotel du Vin, born from shared experiences as a workplace-centered microcommunity.

Diversification represents the third strategic approach to risk management. Firms can significantly reduce unsystematic risk by diversifying their portfolios (Brealey and Myers 2000). For example, tour companies can develop a portfolio of destinations, so that even if problems are encountered in operating in one destination, the majority of their operations will be unaffected. Similarly, hotels may develop a diverse portfolio of establishments in different locations, perhaps appealing to different markets segments, so as to diversify their vulnerability to risks and uncertainties; this can be seen as an extension to the rationale for transnational hotel investments that are provided by the eclectic theory of the firm (Dunning and McQueen 1982). Such options are more restricted for small firms, or for those operating in a single location, which indicates that such risk diversification strategies are resource dependent.

The fourth strategic approach is hedging or reliance on insurance, whether for particular events or general operations. Hedging is characteristic of the airline industry in particular, where advance purchases of at least some of their fuel requirements avoids or reduces the risks of unpredictable price increases (Lee and Jang 2007). Weather is a particular risk in many forms of tourism, as in some other economic sectors, especially given the uno-actu-principle and the impossibility of deferment of the provision of many, if not most, tourism services. There is an emerging futures market that addresses the commodification and trading of risks (Kingkan 2012). Alternatively, firms may seek to commodify and collectivize risk, through purchasing insurance policies. These can be for particular events—for example, against weather or other sources of disruption to a sporting or cultural event. Alternatively, insurance can cover risks associated with the everyday operations of the company, such as accidents incurred by tourists or employees. The next section expands on the role of insurance against risk in tourism.

Managing Risk: Intermediaries and Commodification

One response to the existence of both systemic and unsystemic risks in tourism has been the growth of various forms of intermediaries that mediate, while commodifying, these risks. This applies to both producer–consumer and producer–producer relationships. The starting point for understanding the former is the knowledge asymmetries that traditionally are considered to exist between consumers and producers. Firms, because of resources advantages, have a comparative knowledge advantage over tourists in relation to understanding and mediating risks. Historically, this contributed to the emergence and growth of tour operators. While they have a number of comparative advantages (Sheldon 1986), including purchasing economies of scale, they also have knowledge advantages, including tacit knowledge of hotels, destination environments, local cultures, and languages: in short, they have encultured and embedded knowledge that is not available to most individual tourists. Indeed, the provision of tour guides and destination representatives, with appropriate tacit knowledge—as part of the price charged for a package holiday—is essentially the commodification of risk. Tourists still face risks in knowing which companies will provide the most effective risk mediation services, and this is one reason for the growth of international hotels chains with their strong branding and standardization, and the importance that tour companies and others attach to brand and customer loyalty (Andreassen and Lindestad 1998). This is also backed up by various forms of certification and bond schemes (which ultimately are reflected in the price paid by the tourist) that provide a regulatory framework and a collectivization of risk by intermediaries.

The Internet has challenged the relationship between tourists and traditional intermediaries, such as travel agents and tour operators, in two stages. First, the Internet allows tourists to acquire significantly more codified knowledge about destinations, and individual firms. There is a transaction cost, in the time taken, but it has created the potential to access alternative sources of knowledge as substitutes to that held by tour operators. There are limits to this, however, because there are limits on the extent to which tacit knowledge can be translated into codified knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995) on websites. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of tourists are directly purchasing separate elements of their holidays on the Internet rather than relying on tour companies and travel agents. The reduction in the risk associated with individual travel contributes to the increasing overlap between the categories of individual versus organized tourism, making it easier for risk-averse tourists to become individual tourists on some occasions (Williams and Baláž 2013, pp. 218–19). However, these shifts have only partly led to the disintermediation (Inkpen 1996) of tourism–service producer relationships. Rather they have led to reintermediation with Internet businesses, such as Expedia, effectively creating new digital forms of intermediation, and cost and risk management.

Second, companies such as TripAdvisor have revolutionized producer–tourist relationships, through directly commodifying the tacit knowledge or experiences of individual tourists. Accommodation and other tourism services are evaluated by individual tourists, who provide short commentaries on their experiences of these establishments—that is, they translate their tacit knowledge, albeit necessarily selectively, into codified knowledge. These commentaries provide a basis for other individuals to assess not only the quality available but also the risk attached to that quality: the distribution of ranked scores (e.g., from excellent to terrible) effectively generates probabilities (risks) of different types of experience. Social media websites take this a stage further, providing direct interchanges among groups of individuals relating to their knowledge of the risks—both positive and negative—of advance purchases from particular producers. The extent to which individual tourists utilize different forms of Internet provision and sources of knowledge partly depends on their resources, their innovativeness (Nysveen 2003), and their risk tolerance—although the latter is still little researched. Social media sites are particularly important in tourism which mainly provides experience goods, where product characteristics, such as quality, are difficult to observe in advance of consumption, in contrast to search goods (Nelson 1970).

Another form of intermediation, mentioned previously, is the services provided by insurance companies. Tourism firms routinely utilize liability insurance especially because of “media exposure and possible legal action when expectations are not met” (Cartwright 2000, p. 159). They also purchase property, aviation and marine, worker compensation, and contingent business interruption insurance. Individual tourists also routinely purchase insurance to address the elements of risk and uncertainty associated with advanced purchase (e.g., canceling because of illness or bereavement), or during the holiday (theft, accident, illness, etc.). The insurance industry collectivizes such risks and seeks to substitute certainty for uncertainty—certainty that your cancelation, hospital, or legal (if sued) costs, will be met externally. The insurance industry epitomizes the objectivist approach to risk: “The modern science of risk calculation and determination is evident in the rationalist, actuarial tables of insurers and risk analyses by those in the business of risk” (Cunliffe 2006, p. 31). There are, however, significant issues relating to how the insurance industry treats some forms of systemic, or exogenous risks. For example, Beirman (2006, p. 8) writes that prior to 9/11 most insurance policies included a general exemption clause, which excluded claims where the negative consequences were the outcomes of politically motivated violence, such as terrorism or riots. In other words they were willing to insure against risks whose frequency is known (such as a skiing accident) but not against uncertainties such as an earthquake.

The Territorial Dimension: From Risk Management Strategies to the Securitization of Tourism

Destinations face broadly the same knowledge–risk interface as individual firms. Perhaps the main difference is that destinations potentially embrace the full tourism experience and, almost invariably, their stakeholders have varying levels of knowledge of, as well as competing rather than complementary interests in, specific risks. There are risks to the local economy, to the environment, and to the host community, as well as to tourists and tourism firms. Destination-level approaches to risk management have attracted considerable interest in tourism research, including a number of typologies of crises and disasters, which necessarily are related to risks. Of particular interest is Faulkner’s (2001) distinction between crisis and disasters. Crisis is understood as endogenous events, stemming from ineffective management, or internal accidents, and therefore equates to the notion of unsystemic risk, at the firm level. In contrast, disasters result from exogenous events (systemic risks) and are considered to have catastrophic and immediate impacts.

Because tourism relies on discretionary expenditure, and is pleasure seeking and subject to intense media coverage, destinations are especially vulnerable to negative risks from exogenous crises (Mistilis and Sheldon 2006). There have been a number of attempts to produce a typology of disasters, and these largely follow the predictable lines of human (subdivided into economic, political, and social-cultural) versus natural (Ritchie 2009), although they can also be classified in terms of duration, geographical distribution, and other features. An essential feature of such disasters is the interdependency of risks across the entire destination, rather than being contained to individual businesses. Planning for the risk of disasters, and responses to disasters, therefore requires a destination-level response (Ritchie 2009). Both Ritchie (2004) and Faulkner (2001) have proposed destination strategies to engage with these risks.

Understanding the relationship between firm-level and destination-level risk is particularly important. Although Faulkner’s (2001) distinction between crisis and disaster offers a starting point, the realities of risk and uncertainty are complex. For example, if one firm (say, a major tourist attraction) dominates a destination, then unsystemic or endogenous crisis in the management of that firm can become a systemic or exogenous crisis for the rest of the destination. Or small-scale natural or political disaster can snowball into major disasters if firms experience management crises that render their responses ineffective. Moreover, the consequences of a natural disaster, an exogenous shock, may be amplified because of previous failures to manage the destination; for example, the consequences of the Boxing Day tsunami were significantly magnified by previous (endogenous) failures by firms, and destination authorities, to protect natural barriers such as dunes and mangrove forests, combined with building directly onto beaches. As Cohen (2010) asks, how exogenous are tourism disasters, not so much in their origins as in their consequences. It is therefore important to think of the scalar effects of risk, perhaps utilizing the five-point DESTCON ranking (Beirman 2006). For example, DESTCON 4 represents a localized and one-off event in one part of the destination, so the main response should be to reduce the risk to the rest of the destination by isolating it, which is important because destination images are shaped by images of individual businesses. In contrast, DESTCON 1 is a global crisis event, such as the 2008+ economic downturn, requiring a global response to the tourism implications. Key issues for destinations are the extent to which they can reduce the negative consequences of particular risks via diversification of products and markets, the acquisition of knowledge, and the shaping of knowledge via image management.

There are also important questions about the extent to which all interests are adequately represented in risk management strategies. Firm-level risk management strategies understandably are firm focused, so the onus for representing the wider community and protecting public goods—such as beautiful beaches or historic archaeological sites—inevitably lies with the destination-level authorities. However, as destinations commonly lack the resources to implement their risk management strategies, they have to rely on the industry, and firms’ priorities may not equate to the goals of a community-wide destination risk strategy. Not untypical of this is Beirman’s (2006, p. 14) definition of a destination-level crisis: “A crisis is a situation which has compromised or undermined the marketability of a destination requiring radical management action in response to events beyond the internal control of individual organizations and enterprises, necessitating urgent adaptation of marketing and operational practices to restore the confidence of stakeholders, their employees, associated enterprises and consumers in the viability and reputation of the destination.” The specific absence of the local community in this definition is marked, and raises questions about the distribution of risks and the costs of risks that we return to in the conclusion.

As countries can be considered destinations, in the same way as sub-national areas, there is necessarily some overlap in the understanding of, and response to, risk and uncertainty at the two levels. This is partly a matter of scale, and some countries—notably island states—can be contiguous with a functionally integrated destination. In others, say the USA or China, there are significant differences between the two scales. Nevertheless, even in these extremes, the risks to the subnational and the national state levels can be very closely linked; for example, when SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreaks deter tourists from visiting not only the localities where the outbreaks are recorded but also—by association—the entire country. Political crises, such as terrorism, can be highly localized but may also have national implications. One important difference, however, lies in the economic significance of tourism, which is likely to be far smaller at the national state than the local destination levels, with the exceptions of small island states such as the Maldives or St. Lucia. However, national states do have many of the same concerns as local destinations, and may develop state-level risk or crisis management strategies.

There is a long history of selective state engagement with risk management (Taylor-Gooby and Zinn 2005, p. 7): “risk emerged as a social category and as a concern for government in relation to social insurance as early as the nineteenth century” but has subsequently been extended to a broader range of activities. Indeed, Vogel (2001) contends that European regulatory policies have been strengthened since the 1980s because of increased public support for environmental and health/safety regulations, and in response to high-profile crises and disasters. In tourism, they usually frame employment, health, safety, and other regulations pertaining generally to all businesses, as well as specifically to food and beverage, and transport-associated, risks and uncertainties.

States also have power to regulate cross-border movements, whether of goods or people. Hollifield (2008) argues that human mobility was first seen to pose problems (risks) for the sovereignty of modern states in Europe from their emergence in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, this had led to the imposition of various forms of border regulations. They eventually implemented passport and customs controls, tourist visas, business and labour visas, and health and crime checks at borders, or in advance of traveling. This may be reinforced by various forms of internal surveillance such as hotel registrations for tourists, and employment/police registrations for tourism workers. There are many exceptions, of course, where visas are not required, or even—as within the EU’s Schengen area—where borders are highly permeable. While the main focus of regulation has been on inbound mobility, there is also regulation of outbound moves. Although these have been routine in some nondemocratic societies, such as North Korea and the former Soviet bloc, restrictions are also occasionally imposed by democratic societies: for example, the USA’s State Department’s Cuban Assets Control Regulation effectively make it almost impossible for American citizens to visit Cuba legally. Far more widespread are government advisories against visiting particular countries, which are effectively risk warnings based on health, crime, or political considerations. Organizations such as the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), and Tourism Concern contend that negative advisories tend to target less developed countries disproportionately (Beirman 2006, p. 9).

The tourism industry is generally concerned to reduce border impediments to international tourism flows, and such arguments often become compounded with a neoliberal economic vision. However, the state is faced with three primary, and often conflicting, concerns (Rudolph 2003, p. 604): “the ‘national interest’ of states can be defined largely along three dimensions: (1) geopolitical security, (2) the production and accumulation of material wealth, and (3) social stability and cohesion.” In resolving these competing goals, the state becomes an arena where policies are contested by competing sectoral interests, often against a background of anti-immigration public opinion. Economic interests often prevail in the inevitable compromise, so that there tends to be a gap between public opinion and migration policies. While the debate is largely in terms of migration rather than tourism, these categories are to some extent blurred, and a geopolitical security perspective is likely to envisage all cross-border mobility as representing potential risks, for example, in terms of security, health, and terrorism. Tourism or tourism visas can also constitute ways of circumventing immigration controls. Consequently, tourism inflows may be shaped by broader political and security risk considerations. Specifically, they are increasingly shaped by what Saggar (2008, p. 10) terms “the securitisation of immigration debates,” and by extension this can be seen as “the securitisation of tourism” (p. 10).

Risk Society: Technology and Control, Real and Socially Constructed Risk

Beck’s (1992) risk society thesis is probably the best-known theorization of risk, and it understands risk as being both real and socially constructed. He recognized that major risks, such as bubonic plague or wars, had existed in earlier periods: for example, the Plague of Justinian (ad 542–543) was partly spread by trade, if not by tourism. However, Beck contended that there has been a fundamental change because of the exponential growth of knowledge and technology. The problem is that too much, rather than too little, knowledge has created risks that are not fully understood and these have outstripped the available means of control: “the sources of danger are no longer ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but a perfected mastery over nature” (Beck 1992, p. 183). Traditional means of risk management are inadequate to deal with the challenges produced by major failures in the application or control of knowledge, such as nuclear power station meltdowns, or food chain innovations. Therefore, risks (with known probabilities) have been replaced by uncertainties (Taylor-Gooby and Zinn 2005, p. 19). Moreover, the scale of the resulting risks means they are not contained by national boundaries or limited to particular social groups. Income, class, and location are no longer effective buffers against such risks or, as Beck (1992, p. 36) writes, “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic.” The risk society thesis has been subject to a sustained critique on both theoretical and empirical grounds (Lash 2000; Tulloch and Lupton 2003). However, Beck’s work still exerts a significant influence on contemporary social science thinking.

The key question is whether Beck’s risk society thesis has application to understanding the relationship between tourism and risk. Tulloch and Lupton (2003) contend that because it focuses on catastrophic environmental hazards, the thesis is poorly equipped to engage with the complexities of everyday life, or say of mass immigration and, by extension, we could add, of mass tourism, or any tourism. Tourism has multiple determinants including not only technological changes but also economic and sociocultural factors. Technological shifts, and the power to manage the risks associated with these, map poorly onto tourism trends. Transport innovations have, of course, shaped mobilities, including tourism mobilities (Williams 2013), and the automobile and air travel have powerful environmental impacts. New land reclamation technologies have also allowed new tourism developments in coastal areas at, and sometimes below, current sea levels. The risk society thesis provides a framework for thinking about some of these bigger relationships, but it does not take us very far in terms of interpreting the consequences for tourism. Land reclamation in environmentally vulnerable locations may be made possible by new technology, but the decision to apply it is subject to complex political negotiation between competing interests.

While tourism risks are far more complicated than a simple relationship between knowledge/technology and the power to control this, our earlier discussion of knowledge and risk suggests that Tulloch and Lupton’s assessment is probably too negative. For example, Schillmeier (2008, p. 180) contends that SARS provides a potentially interesting case study for understanding the dynamics of risk society. The reliance of transport and other tourism systems on highly complex IT systems presents another potential source of disaster that risk society provides perspectives on. Another manifestation is the relationship between climate change and tourism—where tourism has been instrumental in the failure to control technology, as well as being impacted on by its consequences. The environmental consequences may also be partly democratic as Beck suggests; for example, extreme weather events impact on places, irrespective of the incomes or social class of the visiting tourists. However, it is also likely that the higher income tourists tend to stay in the better constructed accommodation, with the better backup emergency facilities and services. And if there is advance warning of the impending disaster, then income will usually facilitate flight.

Another aspect of risk society, individualization, also potentially provides insights into tourism and risk. In the global risk society, there is “a social surge of individualization” (Beck 1992, p. 87). The breakdown of the established traditional orders founded on the institutions of work, family, class, and religion has led to greater individualization: individuals are increasingly conscious of the responsibility to manage the risks and uncertainties in their own lives. In a sense, this creates opportunities, one expression of which is self-created biographies. Tourism contributes to the building of such narratives, particularly in relation to negotiating and managing risks. This resonates with Lyng’s (2008, p. 109) notion of edgework: “Confronting and responding to uncertainty is what edgeworkers value most, even as they devote significant effort to managing risks in order to reduce the likelihood of hazardous outcomes” (Lyng 2008, p. 109). Lyng contends that this can be seen in preferences for riskier lifestyles and, by extension, tourism can provide opportunities to demonstrate competences in managing risk and uncertainty. This is particularly evident in backpacking and adventure tourism. Esteem is garnered in the form of self-esteem, and peer esteem, and can be translated, or commodified, as an enhancement to a CV. In summary, the risk society provides insightful perspectives on risk that are still largely underresearched in tourism, but we need to be cognizant of the substantial critique of this thesis.

Social Constructionist Perspectives

This article has largely focused on objectivist or modernist approaches to risk, but will close with a shorter discussion of social constructionist approaches. Anthropologist Mary Douglas was one of the first researchers to emphasize that risk is “a social construction in a particular historical and cultural context” open to different social interpretations (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982, pp. 6–7). Rather than seeing risk as objective, real, out-there, and measurable, constructionism considers risk—like knowledge—to be blurred, indeterminate, and socially constructed, in line with postmodernist thinking (Hassan 1985). Bauman (1987) argues that postmodernist perspectives are less categorical and conclusive and more pluralized than modernist perspectives. Most of the constructionist research on tourism risk and uncertainty to date focuses on the individual tourist or how discourses are produced about tourism risks.

The Individual Tourist: Negotiating Meanings of Risk

Turning first to the individual tourist, postmodernist approaches emphasize diversity, and that individuals don’t passively accept meanings, but actively negotiate these in relation to power, as a constitutive activity (Frazer 1989). Individuals deal not in absolute but in relative truths about risk and, as Denzin (1991, p. 151) suggests, engage in “both–and” rather than “either–or” statements. They do not deal with calculable probabilities and clear choices about how to respond to risk but about compromises and outcomes that may combine different options. They may visit somewhere that is a “risky” destination, but decide to stay near the hotel. Individuals also negotiate shifting possibilities that defy simple rational analyses, thereby placing even greater onus on affective or emotional knowledge, and on intuition rather than intellect (Styhre 2004). This fits with Williams and Soutar’s (2009) view that risk has an immediate impact on individuals’ emotional reactions, which are key in shaping decisions and satisfaction with their outcomes. The image of a murdered tourist may play out strongly on the potential tourist’s emotions, even though they have no clear idea about the risks they would face, and may rely more on intuition than intellect in making a decision about visiting.

For postmodernists, tourism involves “an arena in which fantasy becomes an important social practice” (Löfgren 1999, p. 7), and where social imaginaries—including risk imaginaries—are enacted and re-created over time. Specific meanings are assigned to particular places, and the social meanings of some places are spatialized (Hughes 1998) in terms such as safe and peaceful relaxation and of others as places of adventure and risk. Drawing on Shields (1991), Crang (2014) exemplifies this in terms of how the northern wilderness regions of Canada have been scripted in masculine terms, as places for adventure, where men can test and prove themselves. This partly takes us back to the notion of edgeworkers (Lyng 2008) but also goes beyond this, for it understands that tourism spaces may become liminal zones where the everyday rules of individual behavior are suspended, being scripted instead with different rules about behavior in the face of risk. Understanding of, and responses to, risk may be played out differently to how they are at home, although this may involve either greater or lesser willingness to take risks.

Of course, individuals do not leave their cultural histories at home when they are tourists. The individual’s “response to risk can only be understood against the background of their embeddedness in a sociocultural background and identity as a member of a social group, rather than through individual cognition” (Zinn and Taylor-Gooby 2006, p. 37). How social groups mediate understandings of, and engagement with, risk has been addressed by Douglas (1992), who argues that individuals’ responses to risk depend on the organization of the groupings that they belong to, characterized in terms of “grid” and “group.” “Grid” captures the extent to which norms structure action while “group” refers to group cohesion: these define four ideal types—fatalism, hierarchy, individualism, and egalitarianism. Speculatively—in the absence of empirical evidence—we can associate each of these ideal types with particular tourist risk “rationalities.” Faced with risks, fatalists may tend to be nontourists, who are characterized by nonaction and passivism. Individualists are governed more by individualism than by group norms, that is, more by independent risk taking and taking control over their own lives: this resonates with the notion of edgeworking, and building self-esteem or your CV through successful management of risky tourism activities. The “hierarchical” type is characterized by strong social cohesion, and may suggest individuals with a strong preference to travel in groups constituted of their close friends. The “egalitarian or enclave” type is more difficult to associate with particular types of tourists. There is scope to explore the value of this idealized typology in tourism studies, although Zinn and Taylor-Gooby (2006, p. 39) consider they are “too schematic to grasp the complexity of social life.” Part of that complexity lies in the complex nature of the tourism experience, and in the types of tourism places (and risks) encountered.

Individuals are more likely to behave differently in those liminal zones which are most heavily scripted with different rules about risk, but there is still negotiation between different values, identities, and practices relating to risk. They do not simply suspend the “normal” rules they would apply to risk at home. Moreover, the tourist and the tourist zone are fluid rather than fixed, and are mutually shaping: individuals do not simply respond to the scripted rules of risk in destinations, but contribute to changing these. Moreover, the individual does not simply behave differently on holiday and then return “untouched” to previous risk-taking practices; rather they, and their practices, are changed by these experiences. They talk to others about their experiences, and these narratives may influence their own identities, understanding, and behavior, as well as their listeners’. These experiences are part of their cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) and how they tell these stories will change over time, depending on who they are talking to. The narratives can help sustain destinations, reinforcing the images and impressions of risk held by others. But they can also contribute to changing these places. For example, Elsrud (2001) writes about how backpackers produce narratives about their visits to particular places, in terms of thrills, adventure, and danger, which may challenge other tourists’ imaginaries. In this worldview, risk is not something out there and real in potential tourism destinations, but something that can be contested, and whose meaning is incorporated into and transformed by individual tourist narratives.

Society, Governmentality, and the Social Construction of Risk

Cohen (2010, p. 282) writes that the crisis management approach adopted “in most of the work in the field [of tourism crises] has in my view unintentionally blocked a sociological analysis of the recovery process itself. ‘Management’ has been perceived as an instrument through which a crisis is supposed to be resolved, rather than as a process, which is itself in need of sociological analysis.” Management is not an objective, rationalist process but something that needs to be understood as problematic, and socially constructed through negotiation among competing interests and discourses. Cohen also critiques positivist approaches to crisis management as “a professional practice with its own ideology.” For example, positivist management approaches seem to assume that following a disruptive crisis, the management goal is to re-establish the “normal system”—that is, to contribute to the restoration of some form of equilibrium. In contrast, Cohen considers that crises have “agency” as factors of change, an agency that is contested by different stakeholders, and this requires sociological analyses as much as environmental assessment. His perspective resonates with Douglas’s (1992) view that risk cannot be reduced to scientific or positive management because it is essentially political. Tourism crises, and the responses to these, create opportunities for a redistribution of welfare and power, as well as being shaped by power.

Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality provides an obvious starting point for the sociological analysis that Cohen (2010) called for. Foucault was concerned with how “truths” are produced, which in this case would be the knowledge and “truths” about risks. His writing focuses on the practices rather than the institutions of governments and emphasizes that power should not be understood as concentrated in governments but as being distributed across society through the practices and discourses that produce knowledge. The historical context for this is the emergence of the modern state, and the application of expert knowledge by states (Lupton 1999), in this instance, to the risk relating to population mobilities. The emphasis on expert knowledge was very much part of the modernist understanding of the role of the state. In contrast, for social constructionists, “it is not a specific event that constitutes a risk, but its description as part of a risk calculation make it a risk” (Zinn 2007, p. 17).

This takes us to how particular groups of tourists are portrayed as being either at risk or a cause of risk. Douglas (1992, p. 7) wrote that “certain marginalized groups are identified as posing risks to the mainstream community, acting as the repository for fears not simply about risk but about the breakdown of social order and the need to maintain social boundaries and divisions.” Discourses about risks clearly inform migration policies (Williams and Baláž 2012) but they also impinge on tourism, at least on international tourism, partly through association. Zinn (2004b, p. 12) wrote that “generalized social categories in institutional and media discourses produce homogenous groups in relation to risk” that ignore their diversity. In tourism, we can think of the way that young, single tourists can be categorized as wildly hedonist in their drinking and sexual behavior, and such stereotypes inevitably inform tourism development strategies and marketing campaigns. It is as though all young single tourists can be categorized in this way. Alternatively, media discourses may identify tourist visas as an irregular migration route, resulting in all tourists from particular countries being seen as risky potential sources of irregular migration. Popular and policy discourses influence policies and, the resulting tightening of visa regimes can lead not only to tourist visas for pleasure or business purpose being refused, but also those for visiting friends and relatives which is profoundly disruptive to social relationships and to caring.

An interesting aspect of media discourses is the role that social media play in producing these. This remains surprisingly underresearched, given its potential importance. We do not know, for example, whether they initiate discourses about risk and uncertainty that are then taken on by the commercial media, or vice versa. However, Björk and Kauppinen-Räisänen (2012) found that travelers do tap into word of mouth to form images of destinations. This necessarily—implicitly or explicitly—incorporates understandings of risk. Social media are also more likely to report “exciting incidents,” which presumably means that they tend to report those events with the most positive or negative outcomes, rather than the probabilities of different risks.

Social media compete alongside a range of other sources of texts of tourism (Crang, 2014), including guidebooks, tour company and destination brochures, and television programs. These provide normative guides about what tourists should see, and also what they should avoid, and as such they are a means of “touristic social control” (Dann 1999, p. 163) that can be seen in context of governmentality. Not only do they shape where tourists go and do not go but they shape the acquisition of tourism competences in response to discourses about risk and risk avoidance when at the destination.

Setting an Agenda for Future Research

The core focus of this paper is the knowled ge risk and uncertainty interfaces in tourism, informed by both the impossibility of knowing the future and differential knowledge of places. Despite the inherent importance of risk and uncertainty in tourism, only recently have researchers “turned their attention to the vulnerability of tourism to exogenous forces” (Aramberri and Butler 2005, p. 123). This partly reflects the popular, and to some extent academic, emphasis on tourism as an arena of pleasure, celebration, sensations, and even adventure, but not of risk that mostly lies submerged, or at best is considered only in isolated silos, such as insurance or risk management, rather than as integral to tourism. There is also theoretical fragmentation of the understanding of risk and uncertainty, resembling a patchwork of disconnected ideas across scales and disciplines. Having discussed these issues in the paper, this final section identifies seven issues for a research agenda that can provide the foundation for a better understanding of the role of risk in tourism.

First, although we have identified the research landscape as characterized by disciplinary, scalar, and theoretical cleavages, we do not call for a unified theoretical approach, in the tradition of systems theories. There are fundamental obstacles in seeking to integrate different theories, especially when they originate on different sides of the objectivist/constructionist divide (Elliot 1985). However, we do contend that researchers writing about risk should be more explicit in recognizing their theoretical positionality, as an essential prerequisite for understanding the contribution of their research. Our critical reflections on the limitations of our research sometimes tell us more than our substantive findings. Moreover, confronting competing theories may generate new insights into the nature of tourism risk and uncertainty. For example, how do popular and media discourses about risk map onto the assumptions inherent in research on risk management strategies? Beyond this—and given the dearth of previous research in most areas of the field—a number of highly specific foci are suggested for future research.

Second, although there has probably been more research on risk at the level of the individual tourist than at any other level, this is still one of the most fruitful areas for further research. There is a need for a systematic understanding of how individual tourists perceive different types of risk and uncertainty, their competence and perceived competence to manage these, and how this influences their decisions to stay at home, which places to visit, and how to manage those visits. Given the rapid growth of research in this field, the time may soon be ripe for a meta-review, although there is still a pressing need for research utilizing large, representative data sets (e.g., as exemplified by Williams and Baláž 2013), rather than the prevailing reliance on small-scale surveys of niche markets. There is also a need to disentangle some of the complex causalities between knowledge, risk, and behavior: is tourist behavior informed by risk tolerance and perceived competence to manage risks, or vice versa? Does exposure to risk and uncertainty make you more likely to be willing to tolerate these in future, or was the initial willingness to expose yourself to risk self-selecting in terms of risk tolerance. Moreover, the problem is not always lack of knowledge, but our capacities to process and analyze too much knowledge about possible risks and uncertainty. There is a rich seam of research to be undertaken on the complex decision-making processes employed by individuals when faced with too much information (Stiglitz 2000) in tourism. In addition to these objectivist approaches, there is also a need for constructivist research on how individuals understand risk and uncertainty, and indeed how performance contributes to these blurred and shifting understandings. Both the constructivist and objectivist approaches have much to offer not only to academic research but also to tourism firms, marketing departments, destination managers, and insurance companies.

Third, firms are accustomed to thinking about risk: they have risk registers and risk management strategies, and are used to discussing risk in their business plans, or financial negotiations. Entrepreneurship and innovation are also shot through with risks and uncertainties. Nevertheless, there is a substantial research agenda in this arena. There is a need for research on the different types of risks that firms face—whether endogenous or exogenous and also whether these are country, culture, or temporally specific. How do firms seek to manage different types of risks—via diversification, hedging, insurance, or trust—and what are the implications for where they operate, and how they operate? There is scope for both behavioral and organizational research (building on the work of Ritchie 2004 among others), and especially on how tourism engages with financial markets (Kingkan 2012). This has implications not only for understanding how firms operate in the face of risk and uncertainty but also for local and regional policy makers.

Fourth, constructivist approaches come into their own when considering how knowledge is produced about tourism risks, especially as globalization and technological shifts have intensified and quickened, and—to some extent—democratized the process. The traditional media still play key roles in discourses about risk (Foucault 1991), especially the major exogenous risks such as natural disasters and political/terrorist events. There is a need for research on the place of risk and uncertainty in these discourses, as a counterweight to the dominant focus on the more positive aspects of place images and branding. Similarly, there is also a need for research that engages not only with how tourists use social media (Xiang and Gretzel 2010) but also on how social media have diffused and dispersed the production of risk discourses. What role do individuals and organizations, and indeed those who regulate the Internet, play in shaping who influences which discourse? What types of negative and positive experiences are tourists most likely to tweet or blog about, and how does this transform the knowledge landscape within which individuals make decisions, and firms and organizations operate?

Fifth, while risk has been a focus of state policies since the inception of the modern state (Taylor-Gooby and Zinn 2005), there has been surprisingly little research on how this is manifested in tourism, and tourism-related, policies both at the local and national levels. Of course, there has been a focus on policy areas where risk is highly implicit, such as sustainability, market diversification, and economic strategies. But there is need for research that explicitly engages with risk and uncertainty in tourism policies. How does the relationship between risk and knowledge, and risk and uncertainty, influence tourism policies in terms of both their formation and implementations? Are tourism policies typically formed in the context of assumed knowledge, so that risk and uncertainty are only engaged with at the implementation stage? Above all, there is a need to understand what we term the changing securitization of tourism in the context of radical shifts in state policies to manage all forms of mobility, especially in the post-9/11 era (Saggar 2008).

Sixth, it is clear that there is considerable variation in the resilience of tourists, tourism firms, and tourism destinations in their response to both risk/uncertainty, and experiences of negative outcomes. The notion of individual resilience is different to social resilience (Biggs, Hall, and Stoeckl 2012), although both acknowledge the importance of risk tolerance, and access to resources (material, knowledge), in response to, disasters. Cohen (2010), in particular, emphasized that disasters are often endogenous in terms of consequences (reflecting vulnerability resulting from “internal” decision making that has reduced resilience) even if the origins of the disaster were exogenous events. There is a need to research why individual resilience is so variable, and why some individuals are better able to deal with risk and uncertainty, and with negative outcomes, than others. This is likely to take us back to sociopsychological and behavioral economics research. There is also a need for research, perhaps drawing on organizational theories, to explain—and perhaps predict—the differential resilience of firms and destinations to risk. Researchers on climate change (Becken 2013) have already indicated some of the directions that this may take.

Seventh, despite Beck’s (1992) assertion about the democratization of risks in the risk society, they are unevenly distributed, as are the costs of such risks, in both material and nonmaterial terms. As Wall emphasizes (2006, p. 142), “it is important to consider who should bear the risk—and the answer will vary from place to place and with the nature of the risks.” This points to a research agenda to identify how risks and uncertainty, and their associated costs, are distributed across individuals, firms, communities, destination authorities, and states. There are important research questions to be addressed about which risks are, can, and should be collectivized via intermediaries such as insurance companies, and where the division of responsibility should lie between the public and private spheres. This takes us to a final and fundamental question about how the distribution of risks, and the costs of managing those risks, differ between different types of societies, especially in relation to the degree to which these are marketized or informed by more social models. Does the state or the individual pay for the costs of insurance, does the state provide insurance cover where private companies are unable or unwilling to do so, and who pays for the costs of cleaning up or recovering public goods after a disaster? As with the consideration of vulnerabilities, the research agenda for risk and uncertainty resonates strongly with that about sustainability at this point.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. The Leverhulme Trust is a charitable trust that funds academic research in the United Kingdom. It does not benefit directly in any ways from the research.

Author Biographies

Allan M Williams is Professor of Tourism and Mobility Studies at the University of Surrey. He is co-editor of Tourism Geographies, and his research interests include tourism-migration relationships, risk, knowledge and productivity.

Vladimír Baláž is a research professor in the Institute of Forecasting of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His research interests include human mobility, complex decision making, and behavioral economics and finance.

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