Crisis Planning of the Destination Management Organisations and Managers Behavioural Intention: Application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour

Abstract

Safety and security have become the major concerns of tourists and destinations. Destination image is an important element to be protected by Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) to sustain and enhance visitors’ confidence to continuously visit the destination. A destination is not immune from on-going challenges and possible crises from within and outside. These may come in different form such as the failures of management, policy, poor system and implementation, natural and technological disasters, negative reporting, adverse travel advisory, political retaliation, international isolation, fraudulence, accessibility cut and sanction as well as stiff market competition. Despite of all these threats and challenges it raises a question of how much DMOs managers are prepared to deal with them by way of establishing and implementing crisis planning. Crisis planning is a preparation and state of readiness to implement the crisis plan, crisis communication, SOPs, campaign, etc. that are strategically will reduce the negative impact to the destination and create new opportunities. The objective of this study is to determine the influence of psychological factors and external environmental factors on DMOs managers’ behavioural intention towards undertaking crisis planning for the organisation. The Theory of Planned Behaviour, (Ajzen, 1991) was applied for the study. Literature review was done and expert views were sought in preparation of survey instrument. Pilot study was carried out on 30 respondents of local tourism managers to determine the reliability of the instrument before the actual survey. The psychological factors of subjective norm (SN), Perceived Behavioural Control (PBC), Past Experience (PE) were tested as independent variables. While external environmental factors of natural culture towards safety and security (NCSS) and Location of Operation (LO) were tested as moderating variables, attitude towards crisis planning behaviour (ATT) as mediating variable and behavioural intention towards crisis planning (BI) as dependent variable. The pilot study data was processed and analysed using Pearson’s correlation and the study showed that social norm, past experience, national culture, location of operation and managers’ attitude were positively bivariate correlated towards behavioural intention to perform actual behaviour of crisis planning. This study is important to tourism destination authorities as the result would indicate the level of readiness of destinations’ managers to take the responsibility to safeguard the interest of the organization.