Guiding constructs for resilience in tourism management
Resilience. Tourist destinations. Managers. Behavior.
In order to contribute to the debate about tourism planning and management strategies, a survey was carried out to understand the influence of the behavior of managers in the tourism development process with a resilient approach. From this perspective, a research of qualitative approach is developed, having as instruments of data collection the interview, observation and Quest_Resilience, the latter responsible for mapping the resilient behavior of the 22 managers of the four tourist destinations in the Brazilian Northeast studied: Mata de São João/BA, Recife/PE, Teresina/PI and São Raimundo Nonato/PI. It was observed that the adoption of measures that minimize the adversities that impact the tourism activity is due to a change in management behavior, since resilience is intrinsic to the individuals ability to overcome adverse situations. Data analysis showed that the researched managers have a behavioral style of intolerance, which distances them from resilience. It was also possible to identify that the destinations studied are below what is expected from truly resilient cities. The look under the bias of resilience allows avoiding the reductionism that underlies the attempts to explain tourism management from pre-fabricated methods for its interpretation. Resilience must be stimulated for the development of tourism, especially in terms of management and planning. It is a key factor in decision-making processes because it is related to processes of overcoming, reconstituting, and adapting to the instabilities by which activity passes. The implementation of actions to reduce risks of all orders should be a priority of management and, in the case of tourism, these actions should be the result of the public and private understanding of how to mitigate the adversities of the activity for its full development, taking as it focuses the local community and, consequently, the tourists.