We are happy to announce the date for the final SUCSESS project dissemination seminar: It will take place at University of Johannesburg on Wednesday 13 September 2023!
If you are travelling to Johannesburg, you can combine that with the international tourism conference organised by University of Johannesburg and University of Oulu, Finland, during the same week, Mon-Tue 11-12 September 2023. The conferences is called “From Recovery to Resilience in Tourism: Sustainable Pathways for Transforming Tourism".
"For a long time, tourism has been considered as a highly resilient industry. Since the 1950s, global tourism has been on a constant growth path that has made the industry one of the world's largest economic sectors. As a result, tourism's global and regional economic impacts have become increasingly important. Globally, tourism has been estimated to support every tenth job, and in South Africa, for example, the tourism industry represented seven per cent of the total GDP and supported 1.5 million jobs in 2019.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic changed – at least temporally – the course of tourism development. Instead of being resilient, the tourism industry was considered a highly vulnerable sector to external pressures and shocks, such as the outbreak of the pandemic. In addition, research has indicated that the industry is vulnerable to many other elements in its’ operational environment, such as climate change, natural disasters and economic and geopolitical changes. All this has activated a need for recovery and building better resilience for the future industry and tourism dependent communities. Ideally, resilience building would help the industry to undergo recovery transitions in a sustainable manner and cope and adapt to future changes. This transformation calls for developments and sustainability innovations in tourism research, education, learning, training,
development policies, strategies and governance.
This conference, organised by the School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, and the University of Oulu, will focus on sustainable pathways for transforming the tourism industry, in the context of recovery and resilience building."
We will be posting more about the upcoming events on the project website and social media channels as soon as possible. Stay tuned!