Tourism Resilience Index

This PDF document is a self assessment for tourism-related business owners to help them understand if they are prepared for disaster.  It offers a simple and inexpensive method of predicting if individual tourism businesses—and the regional tourism industry—are prepared to maintain operations during and after disasters. The coastal tourism industry can use the index to identify strengths and weaknesses in its system; the index helps to identify action items that the industry can work toward to address system vulnerabilities and maintain long-term viability.

The index aims to generate a quick snapshot of a business’s resilience, covering business and operations plans, disaster preparedness, marketing, workforce issues, and more. Each category contains questions designed to get business owners and managers thinking about the “what if's” that may come with an unexpected catastrophe. The answers are tabulated to determine whether the business has a “low,” “medium,” or “high” level of resilience for each category, allowing them to identify particular items to address to increase the resilience of their tourism businesses.

The Wells National Estuary Research Reserve adapted the index to create a Tourism Resilience Index for New England, aiming to decrease southern Maine’s economic vulnerability to climate change and natural disasters.