Tourism is without doubt a major export service of Thailand. However, the tourism industry in Thailand, primarily Phuket, which is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country, has been negatively affected in recent years by a number of crises – predominantly the recent economic crisis. Such a crisis, consequently, has resulted in limited travel budget not only for domestic but also overseas tourists. As one of the most important tourism suppliers, the hotel business has also been affected by an economic crisis. Consequently, it is crucial for hotels to understand the characteristics of economic crises and come to terms with the critical factors contributing to successful crisis management in order to sustain tourism businesses through economic crises.
To this end, the core aim of this research is to identify the critical factors responsible for effective economic crisis management using hotels in Phuket as a case study. To achieve this, this research has three research objectives and seeks to meet the objectives through qualitative data collection and the analysis of in-depth interviews. The findings of these interviews provide both rich and substantively meaningful understanding of pertinent crisis management issues.
In sum, this research achieves its research aims by examining local negative factors affecting Phuket hotels; by discussing an economic crisis as a global negative factor affecting Phuket hotels; and by providing five critical success factors (CSFs) towards economic crisis management. Those CSFs are: Crisis Management Plan, Crisis Market Segmentation, Crisis Marketing Promotion, Crisis Collaboration, and Crisis Personnel Management.
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