Perception of Tourism Sector about Community Resilience in Puerto Vallarta, México in the Face of a Disaster Such as COVID-19

Tourism has become a very important economic activity in the world and beyond, a phenomenon with great influence in the social, environmental, and cultural spheres. For this reason, academic research has also multiplied in this field, using and adapting concepts and approaches from the natural and social sciences. Some concepts, such as carrying capacity and resilience, have a long history; they arose to promote nature conservation through environmental management, and these concepts align well with the concept of sustainable tourism [1].

In the last two decades, the use of the resilience concept has spread within multidisciplinary approaches, making it a boundary concept that enables interaction between disciplines. This fact, along with the management of resilience and its evolution from natural to social sciences, has led to the construction of diverse definitions that imply socio-ecological systems and sustainable futures. These definitions are frequently adaptations to the context of each discipline, ranging from engineering to psychology sciences [2]. The definitions derived for the tourism sector are mainly focused on destinations or enterprises (Table 1).

Table 1. Some concepts of resilience by field

Despite the variety of definitions depending on the field of study, the most commonly used words in the definitions are "capacity" and "adaptation" [6]. This means that the concept of resilience implies a state in which the human population can adapt to any crisis that occurs in its environment, regardless of the area involved. According to the City Resilience Framework, empirical evidence suggests that urban systems exhibiting characteristics such as being reflective, robust, redundant, flexible, integrated, resourceful, and inclusive are more likely to be resilient [7]. Carpenter et al. [8] proposed general enabling conditions of resilience, including "diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, feedbacks, nestedness, monitoring, leadership, and trust." They also stated that the processes for building general resilience were not well known and therefore represented a very important area of research.

All these conditions for general and urban resilience can also be considered for planning tourism in urban destinations. If resilience means the ability to recover from difficulties or disasters, then tourism businesses in urban destinations face diverse problems related to that condition, as well as resilience challenges. On the other hand, if resilience means the ability to recover from difficulties or disasters, then tourism businesses and destinations face resilience challenges such as over-dependence on one source market or company, recession, over-dependence on tourism, health issues and pandemics, extreme weather and climate change, man-made disasters, pollution, beach closures, overtourism, and terrorism [9]. By other way, on February 11, 2020, the World Health Organisation announced a new disease caused by a coronavirus: COVID-19. On March 11, it was declared as a pandemic without a clear idea about its duration and effects. Tourism recovery has been stated in many ways for nations but the question is: Have we built tourism resilient systems? The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) proposed the crisis as an “opportunity to rethink tourism and its contribution to the people and planet; an opportunity to build back better towards a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient tourism sector that ensure the benefits of tourism are enjoyed widely and fairly" [10].

Resilient tourist destinations promote prevention, adaptation, and recovery of the territory in which they operate, reducing vulnerability or exposure to disaster risk. They have a long-term vision and promote the construction of plans and programs among representatives of society, strengthening social capital. In other words, they establish prevention, adaptation, and recovery actions for the local and floating population. They prepare, organize, order, and teach the community and tourists to adapt quickly to situations of crisis and adversity [6].

The current situation has caused tourism to be one of the sectors severely hit and that does not foresee a prompt reactivation. Besides the main problems that tourism has to cope with, like competitiveness, growth, poverty, and inequality gaps, among others, the effects prompted by the global pandemic COVID-19 must be added, which has caused worldwide paralysis. In the face of social confinement measures, services such as hotels, restaurants, tourist activities, and other recreational services were the first sectors in the economy to be affected. Additionally, the chain effect has resulted in economic consequences, estimating a fall of up to 197 million jobs worldwide related to tourism [11]. In Mexico, tourism associations' projections indicated that it could cause the loss of more than a million jobs, which would imply in monetary terms subtracting about 10 billion dollars from Mexican tourism [12].

UNWTO [13] proposed priorities for tourism recovery from the pandemic crisis in the world, but it was a reactive proposal document aimed at solving some problems. Thus, it is essential to take advantage of the lessons learned in tourism related to the COVID-19 crisis and develop a route to respond to future crises and build a resilient sector in a broad sense.

These new challenges as a whole lead to rethinking sustainable development as a priority, given the inevitable negative impacts on tourism, especially for those countries, states, and municipalities with a high dependence on this sector. In this sense, the objective of this work is to evaluate the stakeholder's perception of community resilience in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico in the face of a disaster such as COVID-19. The perception of the different actors in the tourism sector about community resilience in this city can lead to strategies that allow shaping the different political decisions and adapting them to their needs [14] towards a resilient destination.

1.1 Literature review on community resilience and tourism

The focus of resilience on the community emphasizes adaptive capacity, disturbance, and social orientation [2]. It can be defined as a factor that links adaptive capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation after a disturbance [15]. The adaptive competence associated with high resilience implies that residents and local organizations can reduce the impacts of disasters by introducing and enforcing policies that are advantageous to community resilience. Thus, analyzing resilience requires focusing on organizations whose functions are essential for community well-being [16]. Community adaptation is directly related to the well-being and quality of life of the population, and it arises from a set of essential adaptive capacities: economic development, social capital, information and communication, and community competence as stated by Norris et al. [15]. The same authors explain that these offer a strategic base in the face of disasters. Thus, communities that want to build collective resilience need to reduce risk and inequities in access to resources, create organizational links, involve the local population in mitigation tasks, boost social supports, and plan with flexibility, decision-making skills, and based on reliable sources of information.

Lew [17] has argued that planning for resilience provides a new perspective on community development and social and ecological adjustments in a changing global context, representing an alternative to the sustainability paradigm.

Cutter et al. [18] pointed out that most of the academic work has focused on various dimensions of community resilience, and the development of consistent factors or standard metrics to evaluate the disaster resilience of communities remains a challenge.

A variety of authors reported by Quinlan et al. [2] have worked on this challenge with multiple approaches, in which metrics include qualitative resilience attributes, indicators, meta-indicators, resilience properties, quantitative indicators developed by the community itself, and even the lack of using indicators.

In this context, Twigg [19] prepared a guide to assess the characteristics of a resilient community and promote initiatives to reduce disaster risk at the local level. The research was performed under the United Nations Hyogo Framework [20] with its main outcome being the substantial reduction of disaster losses in lives and in the social, economic, and environmental assets of communities and countries. At first, resilience seemed utopian due to the number of characteristics derived for a resilient community.

The work was based on the key concepts of "risk reduction," "community resilience," and "community." Risk and vulnerability reduction occur through the development and application of policies and strategies. Community resilience involves emphasizing what communities can do for themselves and how their capacities can be strengthened, rather than focusing on their vulnerability or needs in the face of disaster. While the terms "resilience" and "vulnerability" are opposites, they are related, both being complex and multifaceted [21]. The "community" has different meanings. Beyond the spatial connotation, there are characteristics related to interests, values, activities, and common structures. It is complex and dynamic, making it difficult to define. For this reason, the geographical reference is decisive for risk management [19].

Community resilience includes the economic, social, environmental, and political attributes, which together influence the prospects for sustainability. The perspective it offers can be used at the community level to evaluate situations in the context of tourism development [18, 22].

Tourism destinations face numerous crises, which significantly affect the tourism industry. Although resilience-related research has been conducted for decades, resilience studies linked to tourism are still scarce in general. They have focused on the concept, scales, and theoretical approaches and assessment, but empirical studies and practical applications remain limited [23, 24].

Disasters leave important lessons on the behavior of socioeconomic systems, especially in the business system. Herrera Enríquez and Rodríguez Rodríguez [25], based on the literature, analyzed the criteria that determine the capacity for learning and adaptability to self-organization in response to internal or external shocks in destinations. They proposed that business vision, entrepreneurship, business environment, company behavior in the face of disaster, and female business activity were elements that promote sustainability based on resilience.

The literature related to tourism also aims to understand how destinations manage crises and how tourism actors respond to them, as well as understanding how the tourism industry recovers after a crisis and their ability to find alternative businesses. In some ways, this literature points to the path to resilience based on the vulnerability to crises of destinations [26].

Recently, the concept of resilience has been explored concerning the axes of sustainability, and the influence of multiple contexts on the ability of communities to adapt to drastic changes and sustain their tourism businesses is recognized [27].

It can be concluded that there are multiple definitions of resilience adapted to different areas, and efforts to measure and manage for planning purposes. In tourism destinations as complex systems, the challenges are greater. We want to contribute to this area by exploring the community resilience perceived by stakeholders in a consolidated destination: Puerto Vallarta.

Puerto Vallarta is a coastal municipality and tourist city of the state of Jalisco, Mexico, in Banderas Bay (Figure 1). In 2020, Puerto Vallarta had an estimated population reported by the Institute of Geography, Statistics, and Informatics of 304,141 people [28] and more than 5,000,000 annual tourists [29].

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Figure 1. Location of Puerto Vallarta

Source: [30]

It is the second most important economic zone in the state of Jalisco and one of the most visited places in the country. As a national tourist destination, it ranks among the top three places in terms of receiving visitors, which explains why tourism is the basis of the local economy. In fact, there is an excessive concentration of economic activity around tourism, since close to 80% of the jobs are related to it. Its highly tourism-dependent economy makes it very vulnerable to possible contingencies in the sector. Regarding companies linked to the tourism sector, 331 lodging establishments and 234 service establishments were identified [28]. Some of them were closed temporarily or working under restrictions.