Tourism, Security and Safety From Theory to Practice

The Events of May 19, 2000
Superficially, there were many similarities between the events of 1987 and 2000.
As had been the case in 1987, the effect of the coup on the tourism industry was
swift and far reaching. The circumstances were, however, quite different and
tourism had changed considerably during the intervening period, prompting the
need for different recovery tactics.
The swift conclusion to the so-called bloodless coups of 1987 allowed the tourism
industry to focus on its recovery strategy. For example, the first of the two coups in
1987 was staged in May, but the annual Fiji Tourism Convention went ahead as sched-
uled during the following month. This gathering of local tourism industry leaders was
used as a forum to develop plans for industry recovery. During the Tourism
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2000 Coup
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Figure 1
Visitor arrivals in Fiji, 1974–2000.
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Convention, an agreement was reached to set up a crisis management team within the
National Tourism Office, to be called the Tourism Action Group (TAG). TAG had a
single objective—to bring tourists back to Fiji as fast and effectively as possible (TAG,
2000a). To accomplish this, four immediate goals were established:
■
Removal of travel advisories and union bans in Australia and New Zealand;
■
A doubling of the National Tourism Organization marketing budget;
■
Familiarization visits from the main markets for trade representatives; and,
■
Marketing of special airfares and packages to the markets noted above.
Initially established for a six-month period, TAG was disbanded after 11 weeks,
following evidence that the recovery was under way. A subsequent coup in
September 1987 (after TAG had been disbanded) brought the recovery of the
tourism industry to a sudden halt, but the TAG strategy was still relevant to a large
extent and the industry experienced a significant recovery during 1988 (Lea,
1996).
Like many other tropical island nations, Fiji has long established procedures in
place to deal with emergencies such as cyclones. This meant that the overall pre-
paredness in 1987 was relatively good with provisions to contact hotels across the
country to give advice on how to react. The experience of 1987 showed that a cri-
sis management plan was a necessary contingency in the event of political unrest
as well as for possible natural disasters. Consistent with this requirement, the cri-
sis management group formed an integral part of both the marketing objectives
and the marketing strategies of the Year 2000 Fiji Visitors Bureau Marketing Plan
Summary (FVB, 1999).