Risk mitigation in conference tourism service supply chains

Abstract

Conference tourism is a significant service system with a supply chain structure including academicians as service providers, accommodation and transportation facilitators, visa services, touristic activity providers, equipment and material suppliers, tourism agencies and catering services. High level of service supply chain member participation puts conference tourism system in a challenging position. This study examines the risks encountered in conference tourism service supply chain via both literature review and in-depth interviews with academicians experienced holding a conference previously. Followingly, a final form of risk table was given a shape, and inter-relations of these risks were evaluated with the same academicians by using a fuzzy scale. In this way, how an identified risk affects one another was examined, and interdependencies of these risks were analyzed by Fuzzy Interpretive Structural Modeling (FISM), so that one can infer the root causing risks from the results.