An earthquake disaster management mechanism based on risk assessment information for the tourism industry-a case study from the island of Taiwan

Chung-Hung Tsai and Cheng-Wu Chen

Tourism Management, 2010, vol. 31, issue 4, 470-481

Abstract: Although progress has been made in assessing risks in Taiwan, there remains a need to undertake risk assessment for the Taiwanese tourism industry. Although the conventional rules of thumb usually adopted by the insurance industry for damage assessment may be adequate in normal circumstances, this is not feasible for rare incidents for which there is very little reference material. One such example is earthquake damage. The average period of occurrence of major earthquake in Taiwan is about a hundred years, which makes it impossible to precisely assess average losses. In addition, earthquakes are not like some disasters (such as typhoons or epidemics) for which one can receive early warning. Thus, in this study, we seek to provide a practical mechanism for earthquake disaster risk assessment and management for the tourism industry, focusing on insurance and prevention. The primary objective is to integrate the relevant earth sciences, engineering and insurance data with the concepts of disaster risk management, taking into consideration the characteristics and sources of earthquake-related risks. In short, we develop an earthquake disaster assessment model to apply to risk management in the tourism industry. The practicality of the model is demonstrated with some examples related to the hotel industry in Hualien, Taiwan, an area plagued by frequent earthquakes. The results clearly show the efficacy of the proposed disaster assessment models for the tourism industry.

Keywords: Earthquake risk; Tourism industry; Disaster management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517709001009

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:touman:v:31:y:2010:i:4:p:470-481

DOI: 10.1016/j.tourman.2009.05.008

Access Statistics for this article

Tourism Management is currently edited by Chris Ryan

More articles in Tourism Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().