Learning from past crises: Evaluating hotels’ online crisis responses to health crises

Abstract

Organizational learning is an important function of tourism crisis management. By examining and evaluating hotels’ responses to the 2010 bed bug crisis on social media, the purpose of this study was to provide insights into how to establish effective crisis responses. Situational crisis communication theory was used as the theoretical framework and a total of 136 management responses were included in the sample. Content analysis and co-occurrence analysis were conducted. The results revealed a learning curve of crisis management for hotels. Enhancing and Bolstering were the most commonly used strategies within the sample. Further analysis showed the inconsistencies between hotels’ crisis response strategies and the situational crisis communication theory guidelines, where instructing information were seldom included. Based on the findings, this study discussed the importance of creating effective crisis responses and future research directions.