Staying Afloat: Operating Tourism in Disaster-Prone Areas of Mesilou, Sabah

Abstract

Multi-hazards and disasters affect our lives greatly and therefore it become everyone's business. Every time disaster hit a community, it left substantial damages to physical and nonphysical components (particularly economic and social aspects) that shaped our livelihood. From the community-based rural tourism (CBRT) point of view, disaster occurrences often led to significant decrease to destination image and reputation, increase fear of safety, damaging infrastructure and agriculture land. These led to the declining of tourist arrivals which affect income generation and revenue from tourism to the community. Failure to acknowledge these direct and indirect effects might weaken the tourism community's capacity in coping with future disasters. Based on previous studies on CBRT in disaster-prone areas, researchers have uncovered unique cases whereby some rural communities that operates tourism as a vital income are able to raise above adversity and become resilient. In this light, a tourism community in Mesilou Village in Sabah, Malaysia is selected as a case study. This community was badly affected by 6.0-magnitude earthquake that hit Kota Belud in June 2015. At the time, a study of the post-earthquake has been conducted by a group of researchers from UTM in October 2015 and discovered that Mesilou had about 20 homestay operators. For nearly six months after the earthquake, the majority of CBRT operators were affected with high booking cancellation, damages of infrastructure (main road, bridges), disruption of water and electricity supplies and local transportation which hindered tourists from coming to their village. In October 2018, an impact study had been conducted by the same researchers from UTM and found that CBRT in Mesilou not only recovered from the disaster, but remarkably has been booming since then. This is evident from the survey which indicated a growing number of homestays from 20 full time operators (until 2015) to 40 homestays by October 2018. Two general conclusions can be made from the result of data analysis; (1) disaster did not deter the tourists from visiting Mesilou after the earthquake; (2) the CBRT operators pose strong social, economic and environmental capitals to "bounce back" from adversity and rebuilt the community prior to the disasters. This paper will discuss the lessons learned from CBRT operators in Mesilou regarding business recovery and resiliency prior to disaster.