Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijdrr Tourism Recovery Scorecard (TOURS) – Benchmarking and monitoring progress on disaster recovery in tourism destinations Bijan Khazai a, ⁎ , Farnaz Mahdavian a , Stephen Platt b a Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany b Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd, Cambridge, UK ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Tourism Recovery Indicators Disaster Survey Philippines ABSTRACT After a disaster, tourism declines and tourist stakeholders suffer because tourists cancel their reservations and choose to go elsewhere. A key part of managing recovery of tourism destinations is restoring the destination image and reputation which can be affected by negative or inaccurate media coverage. This paper reports the results of surveys with tourism sector stakeholders aimed at measuring recovery in three tourism destinations affected by two back-to-back disasters: the Bohol earthquake and tropical cyclone Haiyan in 2013 in the Philippines. The authors developed a methodological framework for the Tourism Recovery Scorecard (TOURS), which can be used as a crisis communication tool for benchmarking and monitoring progress on post disaster recovery of a tourism destination. Three main dimensions of safety, physical recovery and business recovery are considered in the Scorecard, each containing key factors that are important to tourists and meaningful to tourism operators. 1. Introduction Natural and man-made disasters, including the impacts of geological events, climatic disasters, terrorism and war, have the potential to se- verely affect the image of a tourism destination. How the tourism destination, prepares for and adjusts to disaster situations has not re- ceived a great deal of attention in tourism management research, even though most if not all destinations face the prospect of either a natural or human-induced disaster at some time in their history. Faulkner & Vikulov [23] report how after cyclonic flooding washed out Katherine Gorge in Northern Territory Australia, the tourism industry was faced with the huge challenge of restoring operations to normal. Despite the effectiveness of a “Katherine Back On-track” campaign, tourism operators incurred significant short-term financial losses be- cause the perception of Katherine being washed-out lasted for some time beyond the reality. Following the Indian Ocean 2004 tsunami, widespread international media attention resulted in an immediate drop in tourist visits in the year following the tsunami (e.g. [26,49,39,52]). There was a rebound to near pre-tsunami tourism ar- rivals once resorts had been repaired or reconstructed [49]. In addition to natural disasters, terrorism attacks since the events of September 11th, 2001, which dramatically impacted the tourism industry, illus- trate the need for better crisis communication and perception man- agement of such incidents [41]. The impacts of disasters on the tourism market are often out of proportion with their actual disruptive effects because of exaggeration by the media [14,19,32]. The damage to businesses caused by the disaster escalates with negative media coverage and a ruined destina- tion image [45]. As a result, the recovery of destinations usually takes longer than the time needed to restore services to normality [22]. The effectiveness with which the tourism industry in a disaster area handles a crisis in terms of a crisis communication strategy has a major bearing on how quickly the destination is restored to normal and businesses recover [5,7,21,40,9]. Media reports have the potential to have a de- vastating impact on disaster-affected destinations and present a severe challenge to the marketability of a destination and even result in a collateral marketing crisis in neighbouring destinations [10,11]. As a result, trusted government organisations such as the chamber of com- merce or private sector operators, such as destination marketing orga- nisations, tour operators, travel agencies, hotel associations and in- dividual hotels must have targeted communication plans and strategies to address media reports and be able to directly address tourists’ con- cerns in the aftermath of disasters. The efficacy of a crisis commu- nication strategy in managing risk perception hinges to a large extent on the degree to which communication plans have been integrated within disaster risk management policies and strategies and the in- dustry is able to communicate true positive messages to the market [22,16,6]. This explains why some models for tourism disaster plans http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2017.09.039 Received 4 April 2017; Received in revised form 15 September 2017; Accepted 20 September 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: khazai@kit.edu (B. Khazai). International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 27 (2018) 75–84 Available online 22 September 2017 2212-4209/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T