A Europe-wide Tourism Destination Socioeconomic Risk Model for Natural and Human-made Perils

The tourism and travel industry is one of the key economic sectors across Europe, contributing ca.10% GDP yearly (with indirect and induced effects) equating to just under 2 trillion EUR. During COVID-19, the major negative effects on domestic and international tourism were a wake-up call to hotels, hospitality and the destinations to become more resilient to not only biological shocks but all manner of disasters in the wake of climate change and increasing climatic peril effects in many locations.As part of the Hotel Resilient Initiative and in the MYRIAD-EU project, extensive analysis of the tourism sector has been undertaken for Europe in order to characterise the locations, values, and types of assets at risk for the tourism sector in spatial and temporal systems.An analysis is made in this study for hotels and their destinations in Europe, to examine the sectoral risk to natural (geophysical, hydrological, and meteorological) and human-made perils in order to examine which locations are most at risk of financial direct damage now, and in 2050 for selected perils. Quantitative outputs are produced showing the most at risk locations in each country and across Europe.In addition, where quantitative metrics could not be produced with great certainty, a tool has been produced giving a multi-risk vulnerability index in order to view and adjust the importance of different tourism indicators such as domestic and international expenditure, employment, tourism stays, attractions at a NUTS-3 EU level. The evaluation of the disaster types affecting it allows for a semi-quantitative view of the impacting factors on the locations, giving additional insights into the effects for the tourism industry.It is found that hydro-meteorological perils have an increasing influence throughout Eastern Europe with the effects of climate change with yearly damages often exceeding 1 bn EUR. Geophysical perils such as earthquakes cause major singular shocks to locations, often taking years for the tourism industry to recover, especially across the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. Drought, heat and water stress however is starting to cause major issues to the industry as seen in Spain last year.  The loss outputs from this study will support further development of the Hotel and Destination Resilient Scorecards being produced in various locations across Europe.