How Well Do Turkey-Based Travel Agencies Manage the Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis?

This research used an adapted crisis management framework from the relevant literature and applied it to the context of Turkeybased travel agencies during a devastating health crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic. The adapted framework consists of six stages and it has been applied in many fields so far, but it has not been tested in any health crisis with global effects in the tourism industry yet. Therefore, this study focused on some Turkey-based travel agencies to evaluate their crisis management performances in a health crisis. An interview schedule was developed based on the adapted framework and then used in the qualitative data collection. Through in-depth interviews with the senior managers of 16 travel agencies., the crisis management performances of those businesses were examined in detail. It was found with this study that the examined travel agencies failed to manage the Covid-19 crisis appropriately. With this study, various recommendations have been offered about what kind of strategies could be effective in such tourism crises in the future.

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