Redesigning Events in the Post COVID 19 Crisis A Design Thinking Approach (Kom Campiranon)

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 12 March 2020. Since then, COVID-19 has significantly influenced the global economic, political, and socio-cultural systems (Sigala, 2020). This pandemic is arguably one of the most substantial challenges facing businesses in the past 100 years (Hall et al., 2020). Although the tourism industry has been generally resilient in recovery from a variety of crises (e.g. terrorism, earthquakes, and outbreaks such as SARS), tourism is one of many industries in which COVID-19 has caused severe adverse effects (UNWTO, 2020b) and has given rise to profound and long-term changes (Sigala, 2020). Moreover, it is not yet clear if, or when, businesses will return to normal (Cankurtaran & Beverland, 2020). As COVID-19 has continued to spread across the world, travel restrictions and border shutdowns have been enforced in many countries to curb its spread (Qiu et al., 2020). Flights have been canceled (Haywood, 2020), forcing millions of travelers to postpone their travel plans (Rwigema, 2020). People all over the world have experienced quarantine or isolation, whilst businesses have been closed in response to the outbreak of COVID-19 (Kabadayi et al., 2020) which has caused supply chain disruptions. Whilst the events sector is considered as a vital part of the tourism industry (Mohanty et al., 2020; Rwigema, 2020), it has been disrupted the most (Gajjar & Parmar, 2020; Gössling et al., 2020) due to the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 (Congrex Switzerland, 2020; Margolis et al., 2020; Min Ho & Ming Sia, 2020; Mohanty et al., 2020; Ranasinghe et al., 2020) which lead to social distancing (Rwigema, 2020; Sigala, 2020), the avoidance of crowd gatherings (Hao et al., 2020), travel restrictions, border controls, and involuntary quarantine (Disimulacion, 2020).