Hilal ERKUS, Akdeniz Üniversity, Turkey
Pieter TERHORST, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a deep crisis of all tourism places in the world. And so did the sun-sea-sand tourism city of Antalya. Will it go ‘back to normal’ after the crisis or will the crisis trigger a significant change? In other words, will it show an engineering or ecological resilience in the future on the one hand or an adaptive resilience on the other? Because the future is open, actors in the tourism industry face, like all actors, a radical uncertainty about it. Under these conditions, they can only ground their decisions on so-called fictional expectations. In this paper, we connect the ‘theory’ of resilience with fictional expectations, and explore the fictional expectations of tourism entrepreneurs, managers of tourism associations, and government officials in the tourism city of Antalya. Some interviewees expect to return to a business as usual (their expectations are implicitly based on an engineering or ecological conception of resilience), some expect a lot of changes in the future that are part of tendencies set in before the crisis but not triggered by the crisis, and others expect a lot of changes triggered by the crisis (the latter two types of interviewees have implicitly an adaptive conception of resilience in their mind). In addition, Covid-19 has intensified collaboration between key actors to strengthen the city’s tourism industry in the future.
Mots clés : Fictional expectations|resilience|imagined futures|Post-Covid 19 Tourism|Antalya
A102903HE