Tourism Destination Recovery after Disaster: An Evaluation of the Tourism Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Destinations (TDRSD)

Abstract

In 2015 a resilience study was conducted in the city of Manta using the Tourism Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Destinations (TDRSD). The results showed significant weaknesses in the capacity of the Tourism Department of the destination to deal with crisis scenarios that may affect the city. The study also revealed an ambiguous portfolio of recovery and adaption strategies. The researchers presented a proposal of an improvement plan to strengthen the capacity of responseand recovery of the destination which was not implemented due to lack of budget. On April 16th, a year after the study, a 7.8 (Richter scale) earthquake struck the city of Manta, evidencing the flaws found in the study. The present study focused on the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the TDRSD validity and efficacy when measuring the resilience scores of a tourism destination, using a mixed methodology to compare the results obtained in 2015 and the problems faced in Manta after the earthquake. The main aim of this study is to verify the precision, validity, and reliability of the TDRSD when evaluating the resilience capacity of tourism destinations, thus asserting the utility and veracity of the tool when evaluating the weakness and strengths of the destination facing risk scenarios.