Regional resilience in the face of COVID-19: A case study of agritourism in Tyrol, Austria

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic had detrimental impacts on the global tourism industry. International mobility restrictions and hard lockdowns brought the industry to standstill and especially tourism- dependent regions were facing unprecedented challenges associated with rapidly declining visitor numbers, missing revenues and rising unemployment levels. The empirical evidence on the Covid-19 pandemic is however often centered around the quantitative economic losses in conventional tourism contexts, with limited evidence on the complex structural and place-based nuances of the industry, including different tourism types and the experiences of different actors. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to contribute towards an actor-centered understanding of regional economic resilience. The analysis of different actor coping and adaption strategies is thereby geared to derive insight on the capacities of regional actor constellations to steer through shock and disturbance. Based on semi structured interviews with relevant actors from national, regional and local level, the empirical evidence shines light on the uneven impacts of the pandemic and related (non) pharmaceutical interventions in the context of agritourism in Tirol, Austria. On the one hand, this paper reveals how small-scale businesses were comparatively well equipped to navigate through the pandemic, due to strong historically grown governance network embeddedness and easily available public support mechanisms. Particularly agritourism farms organized in associations were thus able to access financial compensation and information, which enabled upgrading and diversification of existing services. Foreign seasonal workers on the other hand were faced with uncompensated loss of income and outmigration, and the tourism sector now facing severe skilled labor shortages. These challenges, opportunities and variate experiences of the pandemic hence provide a solid foundation to speak of uneven regional tourism resilience in light of Covid-19 and promise to guide future research and decision-making in strengthening regional resilience.