How do the tourism and digital marketing industries turn threats and crisis situations of COVID-19 into strategic opportunity?

Abstract

The research aims to examine how the tourism industry and digital industry face the risk of exposure to COVID-19. More specifically to investigate how the tourism and digital marketing agencies industries based in Cyprus turn the threats by the pandemic and crisis situations into strategic opportunities by exploiting any opportunities that arise. The research dealt with how the pandemic impacted risk identification practices in the Tourism and Digital Marketing Industry during the pandemic thus far. In addition, it identifies how a strategic direction (and profitability) changed, if at all, from crisis management opportunities for the organizations (in the Tourism Industry and in the Digital Marketing Industry during the pandemic) thus far. The methodological approach that has been followed is the Mixed Methods that aim to understand the general perception of the organizations regarding the crisis and the risk exposure from this event of COVID-19. The field of research is small to midsize businesses of the Tourism and Digital Marketing Industries. The sample is sixty-one random employees from different departments that answered the questionnaire and six general managers that respond to the interview. After the completion of the data collection and gathering all the responses from the participants, the analysis performed in the SPSS statistical program which is a statistical coding, processing and data analysis package.