Crisis-resilience of small-scale tourism businesses in the pandemic era: the case of Yazd World Heritage Site, Iran

ABSTRACT

Resilience to severe crises like COVID-19 is critical for small businesses. However, little empirical research has been conducted to examine the crisis resilience of small businesses to the pandemic from the perspective of business operators. This research note aims at exploring the resilience of small tourism businesses to the COVID-19 crisis in a world heritage city. In-depth interviews with 25 operators were conducted and the results showed that the operators considered the pandemic crisis as a flame to the previous political and economic crises. Different resilience strategies such as business closure, survival, adaption and innovation were applied by different business operators. The results also confirmed that integration and togetherness helped businesses find better resilience when they share pains. The study further found that despite negative impacts, the pandemic created positive social impacts such as cohesion and solidarity among small businesses. In addition, the government supportive policies were not healing, and their plans in dealing with the crisis were not transparent and professional.

KEYWORDS:

• Small business
• resilience
• COVID-19 pandemic
• crisis
• world heritage city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zahed Ghaderi

Zahed Ghaderi is an Assistant Professor in Department of Tourism, College of Arts and Social science, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman. Zahed has over 20 years of experiences in the field and has published extensively in top tier tourism and hospitality journals. His research interests include tourism crisis management, destination resilience, organizational learning, host-guest relationship, sustainable tourism, etc.

Ehsan Aslani

Ehsan Aslani received his Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the Tehran Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran. He is interested in heritage tourism and urban studies.

Luc Beal

Luc Beal is a Professor in the Department of Tourism Studies at Excelia Business School, La Rochelle (France). His research interest spans tourism destination performance, data mining on tourism behavior, sustainable tourism and community development, etc.

Mohammadhossein Dehghan Pour Farashah

Mohammadhossein Dehghan Pour Farashah is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Lodz University, Poland. His main research interest includes sustainability, cultural tourism, and World Heritage Sites.

Moslem Ghasemi

Moslem Ghasemi, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Tourism Planning, Faculty of Geographical Sciences in Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. His research mainly focuses on the Rural Tourism Planning and Development, Community-Based Tourism issues, and Food Tourism as well as Medical Tourism.