Surviving a major crisis: the case of dismissed tourism and hospitality employees

ABSTRACT

This study explores tourism and hospitality workers’ unemployment experiences and their coping efforts during a major crisis in the industry. Turkey faced a series of terrorist attacks and political conflicts in 2015 and 2016 that resulted in a severe decline in international tourist arrivals and caused a large number of employee redundancies. This qualitative study was conducted with workers who lost their jobs involuntarily due to the crisis. Thematic analysis of interviews revealed the individual efforts to cope with the economic, social and psychological consequences of the unemployment. The further discussion of findings with contextual factors showed that the crisis in the industry directed people to move into another sector. They have planned to leave the country because of the unstable political environment and, in the absence of meaningful unemployment benefits, they applied for undocumented casual works and relied heavily on their families’ support. These study findings contribute to the literature on coping with job loss by providing evidence from a specific context, and to crisis literature in tourism by concentrating on employees who lost their jobs as ‘victims’ of crises in the industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• tourism crisis
• job loss
• coping with job loss
• unemployment
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

This study is derived from the master’s thesis submitted to the Business Administration program of The Institute of Social Sciences, Akdeniz University. I would like to thank Prof. Ferda Erdem for supervising the thesis and for her comments on the earlier version of this paper. I also would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their critical and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

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