Crisis Communications by National Tourism Organizations Through Social Media in Asia and the Pacific: Postpandemic Recovery in Practice

Abstract

The recent global COVID-19 pandemic was a sustained crisis that generated immense global impacts and consequences for all related tourism industry sectors. During the pandemic, countries relied heavily on social media as an important channel of crisis communication and information transfer. National tourism organizations (NTOs) play an imperative role in supporting their respective communities and tourism stakeholders on crisis communication management via social media. As the world rapidly rebounds from the pandemic, there has been increasing discourse concerning the value of examining knowledge gained and lessons learned from the pandemic for future crisis responses and transformations towards normalization. This article utilizes social media analytics to investigate and analyze the performance of NTOs’ official Facebook pages in 28 Asia Pacific countries and gathers insights into their social media-moderated crisis communication efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic across three key stages of the crisis. A social media-moderated crisis communication framework for NTOs is proposed, which illustrates the prominence of synergy and stepwise integration between key elements across the crisis communication planning phases, from planning, precrisis, prodromal, and emergency, to crisis continuity phases. Recommendations for futureproofing NTOs’ crisis communications based on the data analyzed are also presented.