Tourism Resilience Index

This self-assessment tool helps business owners or managers check if they are prepared to maintain operations during and after disasters. The guide offers a simple and inexpensive method to predict if tourism businesses are prepared to maintain operations during and after disasters. 

The index helps groups 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, helping them identify particular items that could 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.