Abstract
The relationship between terrorism and tourism is complex and multifaceted. Importantly, this relationship is not accidental but terrorism and tourism rather act as logical companions.
The tourism industry is often a target of terrorist attacks. For instance, tourist gaze provides a way of being seen, and thereby terrorists can turn the world into a stage upon which they can state their cause.
In general, tourism provides an opportunity for terrorists to achieve various goals. In other words, some studies confirm that tourism affects terrorism.
Moreover, irritation by tourism itself can be a cause of terrorism. But what is more, the consequent reversed impact of terrorism on tourism can be enormous due to the negative effects on tourist's perception, tourism infrastructure or investments in tourism.
Therefore, terrorism is identified as one of the most important areas for problem-oriented work in tourism studies. There exist many studies assessing the impacts of terrorism on tourism demand, however, no systematic review has been conducted so far, to synthesize their results.
Thus, the main goal of this contribution is to review whether and how terrorism affects, and especially reduces, tourism demand. The review discloses contextual issues (terrorism, tourism, space, time) of selected studies and identifies the main themes of the impacts of terrorism on tourism demand.
The extracted impacts are thereupon synthesized. Based on a systematic search, more than 40 peer-reviewed English articles from scientific journals were retrieved from the WoS and Scopus databases (from 1945 to 2018) to be included in the review, which was performed systematically according to PRISMA.
Only studies with rigorous analyses which provided empirical estimates of the impacts of terrorism (treated as not single attacks) on tourism demand were selected. From the methodological perspective, these studies used either time-series, cross-panel or cross-sectional data.
The results showed that terrorist fatalities, casualties, and mainly incidents were the most commonly used proxies for terrorism. The Global Terrorism Database was the most often used source of terrorism data.
Tourism demand was predominantly proxied by tourist arrivals, but the impacts of terrorism on domestic tourism were scarcely examined. On the other hand, the impacts were mainly explored at a national level, several studies focused on a global or macroregional level, and a handful of the studies analyzed the effects at a microregional or local level.
Furthermore, the studies focused mostly on the effects in Europe and the MENA region. Identified main themes of the impacts of terrorism on tourism demand were: magnitude scale, causality, spatial scale, temporal scale, comparison of the subjects (countries), comparison of types of terrorism or with other political-security events.
Finally, a clear majority of the studies showed that terrorism significantly and negatively affects tourism demand. Only a marginal fraction of the studies found out that terrorism did not significantly impact tourism demand.
On the other hand, in several cases, rather a limited impact was documented. Thus, the results vary widely depending on the context of the studies, i.e. location, time period, terrorism and tourism demand proxies, or methodology.