Travel disruptions in travel agencies
Sbusiso Mbuyane, Portia Pearl Siyanda Sifolo, Rosa-Anne Naudé-Potgieter · 2025
Crisis events present challenges for the travel and tourism industry, regardless of the nature of the disruption and will inevitably put travel and tourism businesses to the test. This chapter aims to examine the impacts, responses, and resilience interventions that travel agencies can adopt to restrict the negative impacts on the industry. Lessons are drawn from global practices of traditional office-based and online travel agencies (OTAs), while examples are supplied from a South African perspective. The capacity to restructure the business to deal with the ever-changing and emerging market demands will be discussed. The need for the travel and tourism industry, particularly the travel agencies, to integrate their response and resilience interventions with existing technologies to increase the level of recovery from crisis events will be explored. The outcomes of the exploration are that travel agencies need the support of their stakeholders during a crisis period. Further consideration should also be given to the involvement of modern technologies like artificial intelligence to understand international tourism responses and resilience trends.