travel supply chain

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Shopping cart items, understanding the supply chain of travel.

Even for industry veterans, it can be a confusing process to fully understand the supply chain of travel due to the many layers and different terminologies used. This can lead to confusion and a lack of understanding around the complexities within the industry, the cost of doing business, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the various supplier layers. In addition, innovation, technology, and modernization are changing the travel supply chain model on a regular basis. 

This article will explore the businesses involved in the supply chain, the different terminology used, and also how those terms vary based on where you do business around the globe. For simplicity's sake, here is a classic traditional model that is used often and starts with the traveling consumer.

In this example, the consumer works with a travel advisor, the travel advisor works with an outbound tour operator, the tour operator works with a Destination Management Company (DMC), and the DMC works with local suppliers (operators, accommodations, and transportation). Let’s explore those different layers and the terminologies and meanings of each.

The consumer travels to the destination and experiences the travel product. When a consumer books a trip “direct” with a local supplier or operator, they can skip through many of these intermediaries, which is also referred to as disintermediation. For example, the chain could look like one of these examples: 

While booking direct is a growing trend in the travel industry, in adventure travel the consumer is often looking to  experience more remote destinations and combine various locations and activities. As a result, there is still a greater need for an intermediary than in other tourism sectors. Post-pandemic, having a trusted partner to provide reassurance and protection is more important and valuable than ever before. Let's take a closer look at those intermediaries, and understand the value and benefit of each.

Travel Advisors

(Also known as Travel Agents or Travel Consultants)

The travel advisor is a curator of a personalized experience for a consumer. The travel advisor’s unique role is to understand the needs of their clients and to know the depths of the travel market so they can craft a travel solution that delivers on those needs. Consumers who value not having to spend hours looking for the perfect accommodation, consider how to get from point A to B to C, decide what destinations have the best option for their current activity requests, or research which options are more sustainable, gain great value and benefits from working with a travel advisor.

A travel advisor often charges a small fee to the consumer for their expertise, and they often receive commissions from businesses. For a tour operator, an advantage of working with travel advisors is that a curated traveler is brought to them; if the traveler has a good experience, the advisor or agent is likely to return with future clients. Often, travel advisors remain involved and handle client questions and support. 

One of the greatest values of a travel advisor to a consumer is that in addition to hotels and transportation options, they are knowledgeable about and sell a wide variety of packaged trips from different tour operators, and therefore can provide a diverse range of options. International travel, in particular, can involve more unknowns and uncertainty, making travel advisors' expertise and experience particularly valuable.

Outbound Tour Operator

The outbound tour operator will craft ideal itineraries and sell those itineraries to individuals or groups as a packaged product. The tour operator's value is in knowing current market demand and travel trends and matching those with destinations to keep innovating new products. These are often multi-day itineraries–from three days to three weeks, depending on the destination and experience. 

Tour operators are often specialized and cater to a niche market with specific needs, so travelers who book with them tend to be more loyal. This is especially true in adventure travel, where many operators specialize in activities such as trekking or cycling. Tour operators usually work with DMCs in a destination who help them identify the best local suppliers for their tour needs. A consumer who wants to go on a tour through an operator will sometimes also use a travel advisor because the travel advisor can identify the right tour operator for their needs and also add additional experiences before or after the tour. 

It is also important to note that tour operators usually hold a legal responsibility or bond to safeguard the consumer, depending on the country in which they operate. This adds an extra layer of protection by requiring transparency, information sharing, cancellation rights, and assistance to travelers.

Destination Management Company (DMC)

(Also known as Wholesalers, Ground Handlers, Inbound Tour Operators)

A DMC is a company that sells and packages solutions within their destination. They have deep knowledge of and connections with accommodations, local transportation, and local suppliers who offer logistics and activity options. DMCs get rates from their suppliers for products which they then package and sell to operators, advisors, or even directly to the consumer. In each case, DMCs can be thought of as wholesalers or ground handlers in their destination.

DMCs work with outbound tour operators or cruise companies (specifically expedition cruise companies within adventure travel) to provide options that meet the tour needs. Travel advisors can also work directly with DMCs to provide a menu of activity options and on-the-ground support for clients if issues arise. However, it is important to note that not all travel advisors can work with DMCs due to variations in laws and business practices across different countries.

Local Suppliers

In the growing and ever-changing world of travel there are many businesses that offer services on the ground for travel experiences. These include varying levels and styles of accommodation, transportation, and activities such as kayaking, climbing, food tours, cultural experiences, and more. Local communities are an important part of the travel experience and DMCs’ relationships with and connections to these communities is important. Understanding the sustainability efforts of local suppliers is key as market trends show that 90% of consumers are asking for sustainable travel options.

Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) / Web-Based Marketplace

OTAs are best known for selling flights, hotels, and cars. However, many also sell packages, such as outbound tour itineraries or packaged tours from DMCs.

OTAs curate products from the DMC and directly connect the DMC with the consumer. The DMC is the one crafting the product and selling it to the consumer, while the OTA takes a commission for bringing the consumer to them. In this case the DMC must be able to sell directly to the consumer to be featured in the OTA’s platform. This is particularly true of tailor-made holidays which require a strong local expertise. The resulting supply chain in this example looks like this:

To further complicate matters, OTA can also stand for Online Tours & Activities (such as Viator, Get your Guide, Klook). These are web-based marketplaces that directly curate activities or experiences from the local activity providers and sell them to individual travelers.

Adventure Travel Terminology

At the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), we often use the term “supplier” when referring to DMCs and local suppliers and the term “buyer” for outbound tour operators and travel advisors.

“Buyers” are the ones directly connected with the consumer and who influence travelers’ destination and activity decisions. They 'buy' or source products and services from local DMCs in the destination.

“Suppliers” or DMCs in general are 'supplying' services from the ground and destination to the outbound market. Online Travel Agencies (OTA) and online wholesalers are also important players in the market.

Example of Global Differences and a Changing Marketplace

The global travel supply chain is a complex puzzle which is constantly changing in a disruptive world and varies depending in which country the company is based. For instance, in the United Kingdom, there is a clearly defined line between tour operators and travel agencies. Outbound tour operators contract directly with local DMCs, while travel agencies sell products from tour operators or UK-based businesses with a UK tourism license. In contrast, in France, travel agencies work directly with local DMCs as well as with outbound tour operators.

In Asia, travel advisors and outbound tour operators are often one and the same business, calling themselves a travel agent, but taking the role of packaging the trip themselves.

Increasingly more popular in the travel industry is the role of the marketing representative or ‘Sales Rep’ who is in charge of promoting and connecting DMCs with outbound tour operators (and possibly travel advisors). They are based in the targeted market destination and very well-connected. They can work on commission or retainer fees, depending on a country’s practices and agreement between the two parties.

An additional disruption in the market are media influencers who sell their own curated tours to their followers where they often lead the group. Since they have already built trust with their audience, their loyal followers are interested in traveling with them to destinations and experiencing travel through their lens and brand.

Special interest groups are another growing niche market, for example avid cyclists might organize an annual trip overseas for their group, where they might work directly with an outbound tour operator, DMC, or even the local suppliers themselves.

Building Relationships

Developing relationships across the complicated global travel supply chain is more important than ever, especially as destinations and businesses recover from the pandemic .  New entrants to the market should ask clear questions when establishing their business relationships to ensure both parties understand their individual roles and expectations and maintain open communication throughout their partnership. 

Tourism sustainability during COVID-19: developing value chain resilience

• Published: 27 April 2022
• Volume 16 , pages 391–407, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Zerin Tasnim 1 ,
• Mahmud Akhter Shareef 2 ,
• Yogesh K. Dwivedi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5547-9990 3 , 4 ,
• Uma Kumar 5 ,
• Vinod Kumar 5 ,
• F. Tegwen Malik 6 &
• Ramakrishnan Raman 7  

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Explore all metrics

The aim of this study is to evaluate the perceptions of prospective tourists through parameters by which the tourism and hospitality service sector can withstand the widespread implications to the sector as a result of the current pandemic. In turn this will lead to weighing up the means for recovery. The identified parameters are then classified, categorized and linked up with supply chain drivers to obtain a holistic picture that can feed into strategic planning from which the tourism and hospitality service sector could utilize to establish a resilient supply chain. This data can provide deep insight for both theorists and practitioners to utilize. It was found that reforming six supply chain drivers, whilst at the same time developing core competencies, is the central essence of a resilient supply chain within the tourism and hospitality business sector (who are at present working hard to counterbalance the many threats and consequent risks posed due to the pandemic).

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1 Introduction

People all over the world are suffering from severe physical and mental distress due to the prolonged effect of the COVID-19 pandemic (Chatterjee et al. 2021 ) which has been having an unparalleled impact on work life (Carrol and Conboy 2020 ; Chamakiotis et al. 2021 ; Islam et al. 2022 ; Shirish et al. 2021 ; Trkman et al. 2021 ; Venkatesh 2020 ). People’s daily individual, social, professional, organizational and financial activities have been experiencing extreme involuntary as well as forceful changes due to the unexpected assault of COVID-19 (Dubey et al. 2021b ; Kock et al. 2020 ; Wachyuni and Kusumaningrum 2020 ) such as lockdowns and temporary postponements of physical operations (Dwivedi et al. 2020 ; Papadopoulos et al. 2020 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global supply chains and exposed weak links in the chains far beyond what most people have witnessed in their living memory. The scale of disruption affects every nation and industry, and the sudden and dramatic changes in demand and supply that have occurred during the pandemic crisis clearly differentiates in its impact from other crises. All of this has disrupted the habitual behavior of customers, causing a shifting of the general customer base, with businesses and organizations struggling to survive such multidimensional challenges (Kausha and Srivastava 2020 ; Kumar 2020 ; Lew et al. 2020 ). As such, global supply chain management of various industries has been hit hard by the pandemic resulting in enormous losses for many with weak connections in the supply chain network being exposed (Dubey et al. 2021a ).

Creating resilient supply chains has gained much attention lately in academia and among practitioners (Dubey et al. 2021c ) wtih policy makers being required to focus on creating a resilient framework that can help to overcome some of the challenges of Covid-19 as well as help to grow overall performance (Chowdhury et al. 2020 ; Das et al. 2021 ). Many industries have been impacted by this pandemic but it is fair to say that the tourism and hospitality sector has faced unprecedented challenges due to the substantial restrictions that have been enforced in many countries around the world on people, travel agencies and flights for leisure holidays (Chakraborty and Kar 2021 ; Kausha and Srivastava 2020 ; Lew et al. 2020 ). As a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic, around 100 million jobs have been put at risk because of international travel restrictions and low confidence in traveling. International travel declined around 82% in the Asia pacific from January to October 2020 that is much higher when compared to other regions in the world (UNWTO 2020 ). According to experts’ opinion, it may take 2.5 to 4 years for this industry to rebound back to pre-pandemic levels (Goh 2021 ). However, it is not just external restrictions and protections that are impacting the sector, but also people’s perception of risk due to the virus, unavailability of medical assistance (if someone were to travel), financial hardships faced as a result of the pandemic, and the psychological trauma and panic felt that is all adding to a paralytic mindset making people reluctant to take such travel for leisure (Ćosić et al. 2020 ; Matias et al. 2020 ). According to Chin et al. ( 2020 ), as a consequence of restrictions due to COVId-19, change is occurring in human–environment interactions with limited movement of people. All these circumstances are creating anxiety within the tourism and hospitality sector with some speculating that it may continue, even after the end of this devastating pandemic (Kar et al. 2021 ; Obembe et al. 2021 ; Ćosić et al. 2020 ; Karim et al.  2020 ; Li et al.  2020 ).

It is for all these reasons that it is critical to assess the tourism and hospitality sector’s supply chain resilience by detecting loopholes and flaws in the affected areas of the value chain to shed light on which areas or activities are creating value and which are not. Whilst determination of a resilient value chain for this sector is still in the premature stage when it comes to the existing literature (Brouder et al. 2020 ; Gössling et al. 2021 ; Kausha and Srivastava 2020 ; Kumar 2020 ), all of the scholarly articles on supply chain of tourism and hospitality discuss this issue from three distinct viewpoints. The first group of researchers focuses on the current situation faced by the sector and simply attempts to assess the untold losses and damages incurred by this sector due to the ongoing global crisis (Brouder et al. 2020 ; Kumar 2020 ; Lew et al. 2020 ). The second category of researchers (Ćosić et al. 2020 ; Kock et al. 2020 ; Li et al. 2020 ; Matias et al. 2020 ; Wachyuni and Kusumaningrum 2020 ) address and explore the psychological intention and human behavioral perspective of a tourist/traveler faced with such uncertainty and travel conditions. These researchers streamline and unveil human behavior during crisis moments. The third category of studies (Gössling et al. 2021 ; Karim et al. 2020 ; Kausha and Srivastava 2020 ) investigates and speculates on the future of the tourism and hospitality business sector with distinct recommendations based on present trends and human mindsets. However, these three viewpoints should not be considered in isolation, instead the development of a resilient value chain of the tourism and hospitality sector and its sustainability are best addressed, investigated, and theorized analyzing all the three areas discussed above comprehensively and holistically.

According to the Tourism 2020-OECD library, effective tourism policy development needs to focus on some essential factors such as, long term tourism planning, government support, cooperation among all members, human resource development, helping the tourism organizations to run globally, accessibility to destinations, promoting economic development, promoting local cultures and attributes and finally, measuring the performance. This study will assess these factors under five key areas, namely facility (physical location or site), pricing, inventory, information and finally sourcing.

With this in mind, this empirical research-based study has chosen to answer the following two research questions:

What are the parameters required for the sustainability of tourism and hospitality businesses in the post-COVID-19 era in light of prospective tourist’s perception?

How are the identified parameters related to the primary strategic drivers (i.e. the parameters of supply chain performance) of supply chain network, namely facilities, inventory, transportation, information, sourcing and pricing?

This paper thus starts with a review of the literature that covers this pandemic and its effect on tourism and the hospitality service and the development of resilient supply chains. This leads into the next section which explains the research methodology for this study before discussing the findings and interpretations for a resilient supply chain. All of this is then given context in terms of the theoretical and managerial implications of these research findings, followed by conclusions drawn for the benefit of the sector in question whilst considering any limitations and future research directions.

2 Literature review

Tourism is one of the largest and fastest-growing industries worldwide (Ranasinghe and Pradeepamali  2020 ). The tourism supply chain (TSC) consists of a network of different kinds of tourism organizations that deal with tourism-related products or services both in the public and private sectors. To maintain competitiveness in the entire supply chain network of the tourism sector, it is necessary to manage effective coordination in upstream and downstream organizations. Coordination between the vertically related ones such as the hotels and tour operators are very important. With coordination among the horizontally related or same level firms being important as well to nurture the sustainable TSCs. It is therefore pertinent to understand the current situation faced by the tourism and hospitality sector as a result of this pandemic and to consider its impact on the whole supply chain network and the condition in the post-COVID-19 era. Hence, moving forward, it is critical to consider the relevant supply chain drivers which truly impact this sector along with maintaining cooperation among all TSC sectors. This in turn could help to improve brand value, reputation, reduce costs and enhance system efficiency. Furthermore, it could help to respond to any future risks and challenges promptly (González-Torres et al. 2021 ).

In 2015, all United Nations Member States agreed to adopt 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) regardless of if they were considered a developed or developing country which aimed to reduce the global poverty level, use environmentally friendly systems (by tackling climate change and sustaining forests and oceans), engage with relevant stakeholders of tourism sectors and provide guidelines and policy around sustainability (Birendra et al. 2021 ). According to Scheyvens and Hughes ( 2019 ), SDGs can be applied globally to achieve sustainability in the tourism sector by 2030. In fact, tourism-related SMEs can contribute to social and economic development as well as to the conservation of natural tourism destinations. Hence it is good news that many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are growing in this sector, which indicates positive consequences including social, economic and environmental outcomes (Rasoolimanesh et al. 2020 ; Birendra et al. 2019 ).

The tourism and hospitality industry is responsible for one-tenth of the global GDP and can significantly contribute to economic and social development. If it is managed properly, then it can expedite the attainment of sustainability (Birendra et al. 2021 ). Sustainable tourism can also have a significant contribution to poverty reduction, attain gender equity and protect the environment (Rasoolimanesh et al. 2020 ; Scheyvens and Hughes 2019 ). In fact, whilst Trupp and Dolezal ( 2020 ) mentioned the importance of tourism for economic development and poverty mitigation in Southeast Asia, it is also necessary to point out that tourism is linked with gender equality (which is imbedded within the SDGs), as such, tourism policy should be redesigned to promote gender equality. Another important point to focus on in sustainable tourism is to maintain good connections among stakeholders. Good communication and collaboration among all stakeholders can help to attain sustainability and overcome the challenges (Movono and Hughes 2020 ; Trupp and Dolezal 2020 ). With the tourism industry, now more than ever, being uncertain in nature (Robinson et al.  2019 ), collaboration of this kind will only benefit the industry.

Analyzing the economic, social and environmental development issues are crucial for building up a sustainable tourism and hospitality sector globally. For example, Sigala ( 2020 ) highlighted that sustainable tourism is based on the ecological, social and cultural capacities of the local community for the acceptance of a tourism territory (that can be considered as public goods/grounds). Sustainability can be affected negatively by global economic instability, natural disasters, climate change, the loss of biodiversity and regional and international security. As a consequence, tourism can be considered a very sensitive and vulnerable sector. Any shock from one agent rapidly spreads to others and spreads out into the whole tourism supply chain (González-Torres et al. 2021 ).

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the hospitality and tourism industry worldwide (Rivera 2020 ) with most tourist sites not yet open for visitors and travelers having to quarantine along with maintaining social distancing to reduce the transmission of coronavirus (Kılıç et al. 2020 ). It is fair to say that the tourism and hospitality industry facing all these challenges and regulations is one of the sectors most affected by this current pandemic. This has adversely impacted the livelihood of millions of industry stakeholders that span around the world (such as hotels, airlines, etc.). Due to COVID-19, many flights have been canceled and tour guides have also been forced to stop their operations. This is highlighted by the fact that due to COVID-19, the number of passengers traveling by air has declined from 44 to 80 percent, around 100 to 120 million tourism jobs have been lost and, direct aviation jobs at airlines and airports have fallen by 4.8 million (that is 43 percent less compared to the pre-COVID-19 situation) (UNWTO 2020 ). Considering that 58 percent of tourists arrive at their destination by air, that is a big loss to the industry as a result of lockdowns and border closure that has hindered air travel. Coupling this with a drop of 850 million in the number of international tourists to 1.1 billion, the revenue from tourism has fallen by $910 billion to $1.2 trillion (Jata 2021 ). Hence the impact of COVID-19 needs to be investigated to sort out the areas of the supply chain which should be focused on to attain sustainability in tourism (Birendra et al.  2021 ) so that the industry can recover from the crippling effects of this pandemic.

For low income countries, poor internal infrastructure and amenities can be one of the main reasons behind low tourism demand (Khan et al. 2020 ). With present travelers being very aware of the local situation in this regard due to online access to tourist spot information. Before visiting any place, tourists are able to collect all sorts of online information about their favorite or probable holiday destinations with the recent COVID-19 pandemic only strengthening the importance of e-tourism. It is for these reasons that online tourist information or e-tourism is expected to become an important driver for future growth of tourism (Goh  2021 ), informing and reassuring a tourist before they choose their location of travel.

The other major reasons for the decline in tourism includes health concerns, a decline in disposable incomes, and reduction in the number of flights worldwide and restructuring of airlines (Sheller  2021 ). Zenker and Kock ( 2020 ) also discusses a few other reasons for the decline in tourism that we are witnessing, such as a change in destination images, a change in tourist behavior, a change in resident behavior, changes in the tourism industry, among others. Since the outbreak of coronavirus, tourists are more mindful of the rate of infection in tourist locations thus leading tourists to prefer local destinations rather than foreign ones (minimizing the risk posed of catching Covid-19 during travel along with potential delays and disruptions) and to avoid overcrowded places. This is why more remote destinations are becoming more popular over the once populat mass tourism destinations.

Collaboration with health care systems or with other emergency systems are required in the post pandemic era for betterment of the tourism sector along with the improvement in overall customer service experience to benefit the sector (as is being seen in the Indian tourism industry). The predominant factors for overall customer service experiences are price, cleanliness, hospitality (Zenker and Kock 2020 ).

People are becoming ever more aware of the need for sustainability in all sectors, tourism included. Part of this would also be what footprint is being left behind by the visiting tourists and how can this be minimized to ensure the conservation of natural and cultural resources. This was highlighted at a popular tourist location in Wales, the summit of Snowdon (Wales’ tallest mountain), where an influx of local tourists visited during the pandemic and left behind all sorts of litter at the beauty site. Hospitality and maintenance (including cleanliness) of tourist spots can motivate tourists to spread positive word of mouth that enhance publicity of particular such tourist locations. In addition, security, safety and amenities of a location is crucial to attract potential tourists. The arrangements of toilets, restaurants, accommodation, and transport facilities are all important to a tourist choosing where to visit (Kar et al. 2021 ). It is thus imperative to keep in mind a typical tourism value chain which is composed of suppliers, tour operators, competitors, partners, governments and other firms carrying out complementary activities (González-Torres et al. 2021 ).

3 Areas of tourism supply chain need to be focused for sustainability in post COVID-19 Era

From the literature review, it is clear that numerous factors are needed to be considered for effective tourism. This study will assess these factors under five key areas, namely facility (physical location or site), pricing, inventory, information and finally sourcing.

3.1 Facility

A tourist’s travel decision is influenced by perceiving the travel risks and external information they obtain from different sources. These decisions are also impacted by tourist destinations and traveler types. Experienced travelers typically perceive less risk while choosing travel destinations compared to an inexperienced traveler who is more concerned about security and safety issues (Lew et al. 2020 ). A traveler’s culture and nationality play a vital role in travel decisions. Tourists from risk-oriented cultures (e.g. western tourists) are more likely to travel anywhere they plan compared to travelers from risk-intolerant cultures (e.g. Asian tourists). In fact, tourists from risk intolerant cultures are more likely to cancel travel plans if they perceive any risk in traveling (Villac and Fuentes-moraleda 2021 ).

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism sector has changed considerably with the typical tourist now selecting tourism destinations after considering only local and nearby destinations with the sense of protection being considered an important factor here (Prayag 2020 ; Duro et al. 2021 ). It is for these reasons that during this current pandemic (and moving into the endemic stage of COVID-19 for some countries), most travelers are coming from nearby localities (Haywood 2021 ). Many countries and regions have restricted travel movements and imposed strict policies on traveling requiring Covid tests, vaccination passports and quarantine (or isolation) restrictions for travelers arriving at their destination. All of this is having a huge impact on the global tourism industry and will be overcome only when borders reopen, and international flights are permitted to fly without any obstacles (Sharma et al. 2021 ). Some studies have highlighted that in the post-Covid era, choosing a local destination for a traveling plan will act as a favorable alternative for many travelers (Baum and Hai  2020 ; Higgins-desbiolles 2020 ). The industry also had to contend with limiting the number of tourists at a tourist site to reduce the chance of spread of this disease and at the same time avoiding mass gatherings of people for the same reason. However, this will at least enable the industry to remain open whilst ensuring the leisure and comfort of tourists are framed in an environment of less risk.

Several diseases that spread in the last two decades have profoundly damaged the image of several countries as safe tourist destinations; although it is evident from analyzing the past histories after any epidemic or pandemic, like Ebola or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the tourism industry does not take long to recover the losses (Günay et al. 2020 ). As international tourist spots are mostly closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic tourism will get the opportunity to flourish as tourists find local options that they feel are safe and reliable in terms of travel to these nearby locations (that come with a feeling of belongingness that enhance their experience) whilst at the same time mitigating the hassle of quarantine/isolation (Brouder et al. 2020 ). It is interesting to note that in different tourist locations advanced technologies like robots, automation technologies, and artificial intelligence can reduce cost, enhance flexibility and help to maintain social distance (Sharma et al. 2021 ). Thus, technology can handle pandemic-specific problems such as screening travelers, discovering COVID-19 cases and tracking contacts (Hall et al. 2020 ).

3.2 Pricing

Like all other industries, the tourism industry is mostly contingent upon government aids that support it to operate its supply chain network efficiently. A number of multinational tourism organizations access government aid and support which helps them reduce their operational costs and improve their global productivity (Higgins-desbiolles  2020 ; Sharma et al. 2021 ). Government plays a vital role to help stakeholders of the tourism industry survive and for the sector to run efficiently, this is especially so due to the impact that the COVID-19 crisis has had on the tourism industry. In the post-COVID-19 era, it has been suggested to reopen everything on a limited scale but to run the whole industry profitably, government subsidies and support is going to be essential (Hall et al. 2020 ; Tsionas 2020 ). Such governmental support will reduce the risk faced by the tourism industry and will help create a sustainable one, thus government measures are a must. To achieve this, governments could look to provide interest-free loans, flexible mortgages and financing options to support tourism-related SMEs. Governments could also promote tourism destinations to attract international and local tourists (Assaf and Scuderi  2020 ) with tourist travel decisions being influenced by such local government initiatives that also manage the safety and security of tourists during and post COVD-19 era. If governments fail to deliver and communicate adequate and appropriate messages to tourists, then it may affect their travel plans negatively (Villac and Fuentes-moraleda 2021 ). With government assistance and support towards recovering losses due to the pandemic, coupled with public–private relationship, the tourism industry can get a new outlook in the post-COVID-19 era (Mccartney 2020 ).

There are different types of partnerships and alliances among competitors within the industry that could help those in the sector to gain competitive advantages and create sustainability within the tourism industry. For example, companies could share skills and resources with each other that would help to fill up the weaknesses of each other. Screening companies for creating such partnerships will be important during which taking into consideration their common interests, trustworthiness and identifying if there are any conflicts. Collaboration is not a new thing with large firms generally collaborating with other firms to address environmental threats related to the maturity phase of the industry. For an established market, firms should focus on development activities that can improve their position in the market. Hence using tried and tested methods of working together will maintain a competitive environment among similar tourism firms whilst helping them to grow. Thus, companies could also provide cost-effective services and offer several cost-effective travel packages for tourists.

To overcome the challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all firms in the tourism sector are trying to reduce their costs. At the same time, they need to focus on attracting tourists, reduce dependence on tour operators and achieve an effective partnership with other firms to maintain the competitiveness of individual firms and the whole supply chain. The relationship between the upstream and downstream firms is a key factor in this regard (González-Torres et al. 2021 ). By effective partnership both firms will benefit in terms of cost and offer efficient cost-effective services and entertainment facilities to their potential tourist clients.

3.3 Inventory

As the frequency of disastrous events has accelerated over the past few years, technologies have been rapidly changing to handle these adverse situations with technology being a major force in creating flexibility in the tourism industry (Hall et al. 2020 ). During COVID-19, the necessity of technological advancement in every industrial sector has been evident. The supply chain management processes of almost all industries have faced huge disruption that had a lack of adequate technological support. During COVID-19 people have been mainly depending on technologies like automation, digitization and artificial intelligence which have been helping to reduce costs and enhance flexibility by maintaining social distance (Assaf and Scuderi  2020 ; Sharma et al. 2021 ). Looking forward to the post-COVID-19 era, technology will be the most essential element to run various tourism activities without any physical contact such as screening travelers, screening COVID-19 affected passengers, tracing and tracking contacts, etc. (Hall et al. 2020 ). With all this technology, there is also a positive side and that is that COVID-19 has created an opportunity for e-Tourism. Moving forward, Gretzel et al. ( 2020 ) have proposed six pillars for e-Tourism, namely historicity, reflexivity, transparency, equity, plurality, and creativity.

King ( 1995 ) claims that the hospitality and tourism industry is concerned with security, psychological and physical comfort. This could be achieved if, as discussed by Signh et al. ( 2021 ), tourists traveling locally can more easily follow the protocols of COVID-19 whilst visiting local tourist spots. Such protocols would include travelers carrying and wearing face masks, utilization of hand sanitizers whilst maintaining social distancing. Furthermore, the number of visitors needs to be limited at a tourist site to reduce the chance of infection. Adopting all these measures will help to maintain the leisure industry whilst maintaining safety and hygiene alongside providing comfort to tourists by ensuring an environment that is of less risk. Thus, the tourism industry needs to take time to consider the most appropriate health and safety protocols in a post-COVID-19 era (for example all tourist sites will need more medical support, adequate health insurance and sufficiently trained staff to provide proper safety).

3.4 Information

The level of risks while choosing local or international travel destinations will mostly depend on whether a potential tourist makes use of online information sources. International travelers largely depend on friends, family, tour guides and travel magazines for choosing travel destinations. Correct and clear information is thus very important to attract and retain potential tourists and to give them confidence in the sector. Sometimes negative information from social media can adversely impact travel decisions (Villac and Fuentes-moraleda 2021 ). If a place is suddenly deemed too risky to travel to, then tourists will ultimately cancel their travel plans to those sites (Neuburger and Egger 2021 ). Hence proper information is needed to regain the confidence of travelers to travel again and help the industry to bounce back fast in the post-Covid era. To regain the trust of travelers, information from government officials and health professionals is very important (Husnayain et al. 2020 ) with factual information being provided during outbreaks that helps tourists to assess the risks for themselves. Communication is the key here with any unnecessary information being minimized as this can induce public restlessness or panic (Husnayain et al. 2020 ).

3.5 Sourcing

Many hotels, resorts, and tourist destinations are largely dependent on tour operators for their promotion by word of mouth, visibility and services. Frequent conflict arises between tour operators and hotel management because of the detrimental focus of hotel management on maintaining a standard number of customers and average room rate. Nevertheless, tour operators’ efficiency depends on price reduction and profit margins paid to hotel management (Tapper and Font 2004 ). In fact, tour operators are often related to other tourism activities such as controlling carriers and retailers along with controlling various important activities in the tourism and hospitality industry, including contracts related to payments, guarantees and release conditions. Hence whilst the relationship between tour operators and hotel management plays a vital role in the tourism industry, the impact of disastrous events like terrorist attacks and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, many tourism and hospitality companies are choosing to depend on their own websites to directly deal with potential tourists. As a consequence, this is reducing the dependence of tourism/hospitality companies on tour operators (González-Torres et al. 2021 ). That said, even with this happening, Calveras and Orfila-Sintes ( 2019 ) found that despite depending on information technologies to maintain the value chain efficiently, there has been no significant decrease in the presence of intermediaries of tour operators in the industry.

4 Research methodology

This research was intended to capture actual tourists’ perceptions in the light of developing a resilient supply chain within the tourism and hospitality service. In this context, the researchers conducted a detailed empirical study among prospective tourists to understand their individual opinion about how this vulnerable sector can gain new life again after the devastating effect of COVID-19. The experienced tourists were requested to provide their opinion in a structured questionnaire based on their past experience and future expectations.

4.1 Proposed factors to boost up tourism and hospitality service and develop resilient supply chain

Several factors that were revealed in the aforementioned literature review, which could help in turning the tide on the stagnant tourism and hospitality services, were considered and the key factors elicited. The following twenty factors were considered to boost up the tourism and hospitality service and develop a resilient supply chain within this sector (Shown in Table 1 ).

4.2 Empirical study and data collection

The twenty factors listed in Table 1 were sent to prospective tourists to rate the factors as per their opinions which were then utilized to assess how to use this information to assist the sector in overcoming the stagnant nature tourism and hospitality services are currently finding themselves in. These factors were adopted from previous studies and thus ensure the validity and reliability of the factors. The study participants were asked to put the factors in sequential order as per their importance, with the most important at the top and ending with the least important at the bottom. Participants were asked to assign a score of twenty to the most important factor, then nineteen for the second most important, and so on and so forth until reaching one for the least important factor. Participants were requested to consider the factor that they labeled twenty to be the most essential in helping to boost the stagnant tourism and hospitality services (after the devastating impact of the prolonged pandemic) and the factor they labelled as one to be the least critical in this regard. Respondents were asked to provide their opinions based on their present perceptions, past experiences, and future expectations. They were also requested to provide some demographic information listed in Table 2 .

4.3 Sample selection

As the basic aim of this study was to capture tourists’ perceptions about how to boost travel and leisure tours in the post-COVID-19 era, the selection of the survey sample had to ensure the variability and representation of the population. Thus, the survey-based empirical study was conducted among experienced and prospective tourists in Bangladesh. The survey was carried out from a random sample of the population living in eight of the big cities in Bangladesh. These cities are Dhaka, Sylhet, Chattogram, Khulna, Cumilla, Barishal, Noakhali, and Rajshahi. To ensure that the study targeted potential tourists, the researchers liaised with the three leading organizations in this sector namely, Association of Travel Agents of Bangladesh (ATAB), Tour Operators Association of Bangladesh (TOAB) and Bangladesh International Hotel Association (BIHA). Potential participants were then sourced from the client contact list of these three organizations (i.e. people who utilized their tourism services at least twice in the past three years). Once study participants were identified, a demographic analysis was performed to evaluate the sample characteristics (shown in Table 2 ). This enabled the study to ensure that prospective tourists that were part of this study had variations in their demographic factors (particularly in age and education) as a whole.

5 Findings and interpretation of the study data and supply chain drivers that make for a resilient supply chain within the sector

The following factors (shown in Table 3 ) were identified and listed as the strategic initiatives to establish a future resilient supply chain of tourism and hospitality service that will aid recovery from the severe negative impact of the current pandemic.

Stevens ( 1996 ) and Kline ( 2010 ) suggested for exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis that if any scale item has a loading value lower than 50 percent under the respective latent variable, it can be excluded on the assumption that its contribution in the respective latent variable is negligible. Following the same argument, this study has also set its cut-off value to be 50 percent and thus accepted only those factors as the reasons for boosting up tourism and hospitality service.

Based on the above listed factors for boosting up the tourism and hospitality service, a conceptual model has been conceived from this research (see Fig.  1 ) to illustrate the areas the industry needs to focus on for building a resilient post-pandemic tourism supply chain.

Proposed conceptual model illustrating the key areas that require focused attention when building a resilient tourism supply chain due to the impacts of Covid-19

5.1 Resilient supply chain and supply chain drivers

This section will now take each of the supply chain drivers in turn and extrapolate the key findings from this study under each.

5.1.1 Facility

Researchers working on resilient supply chains (Abdelsalam and Elbelehy 2020 ; Christopher and Peck 2004 ; Dubey et al. 2014 ; Ivanov et al. 2017 ; Shareef et al. 2020a , b ) have prioritized the development of supply chain drivers with the structured and organized facility. Shedding light on the conceptual definition of the resilient supply chain, it is strongly recommended that due to the devastating and prolonged impact of COVID-19 on tourism and hospitality sector, a resilient supply chain is a mandatory requirement to establish improvised drivers of the supply chain (Abdelsalam and Elbelehy 2020 ). The capacity and capability of the supply chain in the tourism and hospitality sector should be extended, enhanced and strengthened so that it can independently protect and resist the long-lasting and widespread effect of quarantine, social distancing and lockdown pandemic measures and expedite its motivational effort to recover from the negative phenomena and situations that have arisen as a result.

Shedding light on ontological paradigms of the resilient supply chain (Dubey et al. 2017 ; Dwivedi et al. 2018 ; Kamalahmadi and Parast 2016 ; Purvis et al. 2016 ; Scholten and Schilder 2015 ; Scholten et al. 2020 ; Sheffi 2001 ; Stevenson and Busby 2015 ; Tukamuhabwa et al. 2017 ; Shareef et al. 2019 ), this study has highlighted that a self-protective, adaptive and improvised supply chain of the tourism and hospitality sector can mitigate all negative aspects such as the disruptions witnessed globally by the sector. Unprecedented threats caused by the current pandemic through reforming an organizations capacity can ensure the development and establishment of a resilient supply chain, but it should be pointed out that this path may not be easy tactically, procedurally or when it comes to organizations structures. Thus, substantial improvement of supply chain drivers is the essential precondition in this context (Christopher and Peck 2004 ; Shareef et al. 2020a , b ).

Analyzing the present impact of COVID-19 and its enduring aggressiveness, researchers are striving and searching for effective alternatives (de Sá et al. 2020 ). In this regard, scholarly articles (Dubey et al. 2014 ; Sifolo et al. 2019 ; Shareef et al. 2019 ) have heuristically focused on capacity development by restructuring the six drivers of supply chain namely, facility, inventory, transportation, information, sourcing and pricing in the hope to ensure a resilient supply chain in future. To facilitate the drivers of supply chain with new scopes and opportunities aligning with the changed situation of tourism and hospitality service, distinct and phase-wise processes are recommended to reduce the disruptions in developing resilient supply chains (Dubey et al. 2014 ; Ivanov et al. 2017 ; Scholten et al. 2020 ; Shareef et al. 2020a , b ). Mittal and Sinha ( 2021 ) discuss how assurance of a resilient supply chain mitigating disruptions without potential shrinkage in performance is substantially dependent on the restructuring of the supply chain driver: facility.

When it comes to the tourism and hospitality service, this driver can be viewed as the physical location or site as well as accommodation with surrounding areas where tourists will visit and stay, i.e. their primary destination of the planned tour (Mittal and Sinha 2021 ; Ngoc Su et al. 2021 ; Sifolo et al. 2019 ). Respondents of this survey are keenly aware of this driver in energizing potential future tours and in overcoming all the negative consequences of the current pandemic. This study found that a well-designed facility equipped with new features to protect and withstand contamination threats, such as that of COVID-19, is an essential and almost mandatory desire of prospective tourists. Study participants expressed their immense eagerness to have a physical location or site as well as accommodation as a tourist place that has certain new features which can support the new equilibrium of the world in the post-pandemic era. Among several desires, they pointed out that in the future they would like to be able to once again select any venue or facility as their tour location which is a well-known place, both familiar and common. However, they felt that the location should not be too crowded as this would make it difficult to avoid physical interaction and contamination. Thus, having the ability to maintain physical safety is the prime criterion for prospective tourists to plan their future tours after this pandemic ends.

Therefore, withstanding and recovering from the current threats of the pandemic and establishing a resilient supply chain for the tourism and hospitality service is fundamentally rooted in the design of an innovative facility as the supply chain driver. This finding is well supported by many scholars (Hall et al. 2020 ; Lengnick-Hall et al. 2011 ; Nilakant et al. 2014 ; Shareef et al. 2021a ) working on the destructive impact of the current pandemic on tourism and hospitality service and the successive recovery procedures. Some researchers (Mittal and Sinha 2021 ; Ngoc Su et al. 2021 ) have suggested that to design a well-equipped facility that can provide satisfactory and adaptable features meeting the new expectations of tourists to fight against all the negative consequences of the pandemic based on their experience, is not only crucial but also could be a vulnerable issue and the most challenging task faced by tourism and hospitality companies. Selecting a new, uncommon, and challenging venue for the tour was a common and traditional behavior of tourists prior to the tribulations experienced from COVID-19 (Mittal and Sinha 2021 ; Ngoc Su et al. 2021 ; Shareef et al. 2021b ). Whilst present tourists would like to start vacation tours again there are certain new adjustments that now have to be taken into account along with, for instance, tourists wishing to travel to a neighborhood place that is familiar, reliable and trustworthy in location and free from mass gathering so that social distancing can be maintained (Mittal and Sinha 2021 ; Ngoc Su et al. 2021 ). This leads to the first proposition of this study:

Proposition 1

More structured and organized facility provides greater opportunity to create resilience within tourism supply chain management.

5.1.2 Pricing

Supply chain driver “ Pricing ” is one of the most important issues to design an effective and sustainable supply chain for tourism and hospitality service especially nowadays having faced a prolonged and continuous lockdown that has created stagnant business issues for this sector. This driver has potential contribution in designing, organizing and planning a resilient supply chain for tourism and hospitality services counter balancing scarcity of income and restraint on the scope of luxury. For the tourism and hospitality services supply chain, this driver can be deemed to be how much expenditure is required as the package cost for any tour so that the supply chain can properly adjust costs to take into account tourists' present financial distress due to COVID-19 (Sifolo et al. 2019 ).

It is fair to say that researches unanimously agree that one of the major thrusts and experiences of this current pandemic is that general tourists have suffered as a consequence of the severe financial uncertainty and hardship (Abdelsalam and Elbelehy 2020 ; Christopher and Peck 2004 ; Mittal and Sinha 2021 ; Ngoc Su et al. 2021 ; Sifolo et al. 2019 ). Among the many reasons for this financial suffering has been prominent incidents like losing one’s job, reduced opportunity to secure a new job, the decreased earning potential, financial uncertainty, reduced salary or income, stagnant business all of which have been contributing to the alarming growth of unemployment, etc. (Manhas and Nair  2020 ; de Sá et al. 2020 ). These insecurities have provoked general people to shrink their transaction money and accentuate precautionary money (Shareef et al. 2021b ). At the same time, extreme financial hardship and unusual, prolonged and unprecedented uncertainty has resulted in mental health difficulties for some along resulting in all sorts of distress such as nervousness and fidgetiness among people curtailing any kind of voluntary expenditure (Manhas and Nair  2020 ; de Sá et al. 2020 ).

The survey result from this study indicated that tourists believe that future vacation trips should be planned as a trade-off between necessity and capability. Participants felt that such trips should be considered and organized as recreation with several restrictions and limitations in place. After all, for physical change and mental relief of stress, vacation tours are essential for prospective tourists (Shareef et al. 2021b ); however, in this case, the potential consideration by study participants is the amount of expenditure required to conduct that trip. They look for cost-effective tours, accommodation, food and transportation along with entertainment with limited prices during vacation. Therefore, one of the primary drivers of the supply chain is pricing with measured consideration needed to be given to this driver when designing any package tour, hotel, and food and vacation expenditure. It is thus one of the key deciding factors in the recovery from the current stagnant situation the tourism and hospitality service finds itself in along with this driver being critical in establishing a resilient supply chain that can withstand all present day threats. This leads to the second proposition of this study:

Proposition 2

More cost-effective tour planning will lead to the creation of more resilience in tourism supply chain management.

5.1.3 Inventory

Inventory management as a supply chain driver is crucial for any traditional commodity-based service flow (Dwivedi et al. 2018 ). For a service type business like tourism and hospitality, its characteristics and significance are quite different; nevertheless, as a supplementary tool, inventory control and management of this service needs careful planning to reflect the current situation and demand due to the COVID-19 health crisis. This driver can be viewed as the service components, any supplementary facilities, and amenities provided to the tourists by the service providers (primarily by the owner of the facility) during the period of the tour (Mittal and Sinha 2021 ). To cope with the current unexpected situation and adapt to the unprecedented threats imposed by the spread of this infectious disease, tourists are conscious of multidimensional threats related to health, finance, stress, isolation, mental agony and unfortunately death (Shareef et al. 2021b ). Thus, they propose new facilities, alternative arrangements, and constructive support from service providers within the tourism and hospitality sector during this crisis.

Respondents of this survey were found to be cautious about at least two urgent and mandatory support service components which, in the past, were not in that much demand for past vacation tours. Irrespective of country of residence, this is a global pandemic and as such, people have experienced unprecedented suffering having to contend with multiple threats as a result of the devastating spread of this infectious disease. The impact of this pandemic was not even imagined before it hit, and consequently people somehow assumed and obtained the impression that some supplementary services would almost be mandatory for a healthy existence during any travels and leisure tours (Li et al. 2020 ; Ngoc Su et al. 2021 ). Health crisis and continuous threat of sickness forced the potential tourist to consider and evaluate the merit and quality of a tour based on definite availability of and accessibility to medical support by the service provider of tourism and hospitality, transportation, and accommodation during the vacation. This leads to the second proposition of this study:

Proposition 3

Effective inventory management planning will create more resilience in tourism supply chain management.

5.1.4 Transportation

Transportation and logistics management is a strong driver for a sustainable supply chain (Dwivedi et al. 2018 ; Shareef et al. 2019 ). Convenient transportation scope which is both easy and cost-cutting is the fundamental issue to fight and withstand this pandemic and to recover from the losses on many levels by promoting the tourism and hospitality business (Kock et al. 2020 ; Li et al. 2020 ; Wachyuni and Kusumaningrum 2020 ). This driver can be defined for tourism and hospitality service as the entire movement of tourists from the origin to the destination through different intermediary points (if any) (Dwivedi et al.  2018 ; Shareef et al.  2019 ). This pandemic has a crippled many business sectors; however, among the most severely affected sectors, the transportation business including airlines, buses, train services is the leading one (Brouder et al. 2020 ; Ćosić et al. 2020 ; Gössling et al. 2021 ; Karim et al. 2020 ). This sector has incurred severe losses, laid–off many employees, and almost collapsed. Now to turn around this sector that has been brought to its knees requires a recovery strategy, with the first and foremost initiative being to design a cost-effective tour plan for vacation lovers (Mittal and Sinha 2021 ; Ngoc Su et al. 2021 ; Sifolo et al. 2019 ).

This present survey acknowledged the same findings revealed by many scholarly studies, and that is, while the widespread effect and threat of the pandemic is gradually diminishing, tourists have started cognition and deliberation over different types of vacation and leisure tours; however, in this context, mode and cost of transportation are two vital issues for them. This pandemic has raised many issues of risk including sickness and other medical problems, mass contamination and gathering, financial hardship, social isolation, etc. (Brouder et al. 2020 ; Gössling et al. 2021 ), thus the tourist feels they need a cost-effective mode of transportation from their place of origin to the travel destination. With regards transportation, the potential tourists’ essential requirements include an easy mode of transportation, free from risk of contamination, and a trustworthy and reliable servicer. Considering the aforementioned requirements, it can be postulated that designing a resilient supply chain for tourism and hospitality services substantially depends on the desired features and characteristics of the supply chain driver, transportation. This leads on to the fourth proposition of this study:

Proposition 4

Convenient and cost-effective transportation will create more resilience in tourism supply chain management.

5.1.5 Information and sourcing

Sociologists and behavioral psychologists revealed that uncertainty in life and society may inflict nervousness and panic among people (Brouder et al. 2020 ; Gössling et al. 2021 ; Ćosić et al. 2020 ; Kock et al. 2020 ; Li et al. 2020 ; Matias et al. 2020 ; Wachyuni and Kusumaningrum 2020 ). Heuristically, this symptom creates a deep urge for transparency, accountability, and accessibility (Shareef et al. 2021b ). During a similar situation, for instance, this current pandemic, people start searching for explicit and detailed information about the problems, incidents, and recovery procedures (Mittal and Sinha 2021 ). Information is a strong driver for developing a resilient supply chain, and its urge is growing rapidly and urgently from the tourists. Shedding light on tourism and hospitality service, information as a driver of the supply chain can be explained as the accessibility and availability of detailed data about resources, protocols, procedures, reputation, and reliability for all other five drivers of the supply chain (Dwivedi et al. 2018 ; Shareef et al. 2021b ).

Psychologists affirm that uncertainty in life necessitates the presence of belongingness, empathy and mental support (Brouder et al. 2020 ; Ćosić et al. 2020 ; Gössling et al. 2021 ). Due to panic and mental agony, people during the pandemic have been striving to maintain connectivity with family members and friends (around the world and locally), and thus, technological support like wi-fi is an essential tool and requirement for the prospective tourist to evaluate the venue of the tour, travel and accommodation while planning for leisure tours. Pragmatically, any crisis moment instigates a search for clear information about the phenomenon multiple times (Matias et al. 2020 ). Therefore, during the present pandemic period when crisis, mental distress agony, social unrest and a heightened awareness of the severity of a wave of infection (which are increasingly common and currently regular trends), tourists aggressively look for detailed information about the entire tour while designing the tour plan to give them peace of mind (Brouder et al. 2020 ; Gössling et al. 2021 ; Ćosić et al. 2020 ).

Respondents of this study’s survey, who were considered as prospective tourists, have, like us all, suffered enormously due to this pandemic. The respondents as a consequence had strongly recommended the need for a clear and big picture of their entire tour before they embarked on the tours practically. Study participants felt that it should include information from each and every sector associated with their tours including rules and regulations. Due to uncertainty everywhere, tourists are nervous and panicky (Kock et al. 2020 ; Li et al. 2020 ; Matias et al. 2020 ; Wachyuni and Kusumaningrum 2020 ) with feelings of stress, tension and unrest. It is for these reasons that our respondents felt that they essentially needed to collect detailed information about the entire torus and its associated areas without any possible loopholes so that they could satisfy their inquisitive (and anxious) mind.

Under the aforementioned rationales, people also eagerly look for reliability, accountability, and authenticity of the collected information (Matias et al. 2020 ). As such, the social reputation and trustworthiness of the information provided is extremely important, particularly in the crisis moment, suggested by the sociologists (Shareef et al. 2021b ). For the first couple of months of the pandemic, social, national and individual life was very much unsettled, unpredictable, fuzzy and indistinguishable. Information about current situations, country status, the future trends of the corona is so unclear that people enthusiastically search for the reliability of the source (something they had time to do when in lockdown or under local restrictions). Consequently, the importance of the source of the information is gradually climbing up (Shareef et al. 2021b ). This driver can be restructured and defined for tourism and hospitality service as the person, company and country that is designated to serve and perform any activities of the entire tour package (Abdelsalam and Elbelehy 2020 ; Mittal and Sinha 2021 ). This is required so that image and reputation of the service provider of the supply chain can be undisputedly verified and evaluated. Respondents of this study also echoed such requirements from this driver of the supply chain.

There are lots of concerning issues now surfacing in tourists minds about the tour package which include, the infection rate of the place of the tour, accessibility of medical support at the location, availability of health facilities, provision of health insurance, hygiene protocol of the accommodator, cultural motive and behavior of the people at the tour location and surroundings along with reliability of and confidence in the country of destination. Potential tourists overall are looking for trustworthiness, reliability, reputation and transparency along with assessing the image of the people, society, and country related with the tour. Tourists, according to the findings of this survey, believe that a resilient supply chain of tourism and hospitality service is connected with the image of the stakeholders of the tours: this is the supply chain driver sourcing. Thus, leading on to the fifth proposition of this study:

Proposition 5

Information and sourcing is crucial for convenient and cost-effective transportation and will lead to the creation of more resilience in tourism supply chain management.

6 Theoretical and managerial implications

Developing and establishing a resilient supply chain for tourism and hospitality services as they endure or emerge from this pandemic, is something this study can provide deep insight into for both theorists and practitioners. People associated with this tourism and hospitality sector are striving to find some definite ways to resist the ongoing threats imposed by this widespread infectious disease, such as withstanding the resulting global economic downturn, design effective exit plans to recover their losses (if businesses have been fortunate not to have to close) and at the bare minimum survive the current economic climate incurred, and formulate strategic action to boost their future growth.

Academics are deeply aware and keenly interested in exploring this turbulent situation the business sector finds itself in, particularly for the tourism and hospitality services. They are keen to identify the plausible problems of disruptions in the supply chain of this service sector, and recommend some specific guidelines in light of the theoretical (and observed) aspects of tourists’ behavior and supply chain management (Abdelsalam and Elbelehy 2020 ; Christopher and Peck 2004 ; Mittal and Sinha 2021 ). Under these circumstances, developing a resilient supply chain for this vulnerable and cross-functional business is extremely important to turn around the sector's current woes through adaptation and learning that embrace positive change. Since the finding of this study is completely dependent on the perception, experience and recommendations of actual prospective tourists, it has potential merit for academics, sector managers and governments alike.

Counterbalancing all disruptions during disaster and uncertainty and developing a resilient supply chain is a potential issue for those analyzing and informing this sector. The ongoing uncertainty of this current pandemic (including the emergence of new variants) is a serious challenge for researchers of resilient supply chains trying to formulate and assess theoretical solutions to disruptions for any vulnerable sector (Dubey et al. 2014 ; Ivanov et al. 2017 ). To this end, evaluating and reflecting on consumers’ behavior can be effective when seeking remedial supply chain data (within the tourism and hospitality sector) that ultimately provides deep insight for the researcher. In that sense, this study has opened many doors for potential researchers in this area wishing to understand major stakeholders on the service receiver side. Using this study’s findings, researchers could apply prospective tourists’ perceptions and recommendations in the theoretical development of a resilient supply chain for the tourism and hospitality service sector.

Evidently, this study could help both researchers and practitioners obtain interesting characteristics and information about possible exit strategies that the tourism and hospitality service supply chain could use. For example, from the expectations of actual tourists, based on their perceptions of the industry, this study has clearly revealed that a resilient supply chain should meet the essential characteristics of both an efficient and responsive supply chain. For all the six drivers of the supply chain, respondents almost unanimously expressed their mandatory desire that they would choose to return to normal tourist behavior and initiate leisure tours if, in all sectors, all components of service (and in all phases) are designed in a cost-effective manner. That means cross-functional cost-cutting is a fundamental requirement. Pragmatically, this demand necessitates service providers of the tourism and hospitality sector to design an efficient supply chain. Study participants also expressed their immense desire (actually compulsory) that tour packages should be furnished with some additional features and unique quality assurance, for instance, the availability of free and seamless wi-fi, accessibility and availability of adequate and personalized medical support, innovative entertainment, space that is free from mass gatherings, transparency in information, proper maintenance of hygiene, etc. Consequently, the design of a responsive supply chain is a predetermined mandate of service providers when assessing their responses in this investigation. Therefore, the design of a resilient supply chain for the service sector essentially needs a well-balanced trade-off between an efficient and responsive supply chain. This really is a new and interesting proposal for researchers and practitioners to think about and deliberate over.

From the practitioner’s perspective, this study provides insight into this sector to assist their understanding and decision making. For tourism and hospitality service providers to be able to turn around with new hope from the relentless uncertainty they have had to endure, they have to consider reforming their service patterns. During and after the pandemic, tourists’ behavior and attitude, and expectations have changed drastically; hence the need to adjust to such changing phenomena for the future to be bright, with the critical need in establishing a resilient supply chain. Transparency, accountability, reliability, and reputation of the tour venues are of utmost importance in the new equilibrium of the post-pandemic era. Information regarding hygiene, medical support and health insurance is a prime consideration. Now tourists prefer more common, well known and neighborhood local places to take leisure trips instead of challenging and adventurous sites. However, moving forward for any kind of tour package, cost-effectiveness is a mandatory requirement for the tourists.

7 Conclusions

Understanding the true situation and performance of the tourism and hospitality business during this current pandemic, it is critical to take into account the perceptions, thoughts, and responses of prospective tourists due to extreme stress and negative impacts resulting from multiple areas. For instance, the financial, social, cultural, family bonding, health, sickness (and sadly death), job, and finally recreation, all depend on analyzing and synthesizing several areas of the tourism and hospitality service through these multiple lenses. The heuristics, impacts and probable future in the light of the capability of firms working in this sector needs to thus consider an array of issues a tourist faces under extreme personal stress and uncertainty that arises from these multiple areas. Keeping this in mind, the drivers of the supply chain should be focused to resolve the catastrophic situation by developing a resilient supply chain and for sustainability of tourism and hospitality business.

This study was designed to achieve two interconnected objectives. Initially, the research focused on exploring the recommendations as parameters (elicited from the study data) by which the tourism and hospitality service sector can use in the future to withstand the widespread attack of not only the current pandemic but future pandemics (including concerning mutations of the current pandemic as we have seen with the likes of Delta and now Omicron variants) and for the industry to utilize this intelligence strategically to turn around the sector and as a tourist ecosystem and into recovery mode. Finally, this study classified, categorized and related identified parameters with supply chain drivers to gain a holistic picture of a strategic plan to establish a resilient supply chain for this tourism and hospitality service sector through data collection using a detailed survey from the actual and prospective tourists in Bangladesh. Results indicated that reforming the six drivers of the supply chain and at the same time developing core competencies was deemed to be the central essence of a resilient supply chain of tourism and hospitality business which is at present trying to counter balance all the negative threats and their successive consequences of the pandemic.

It was found that whilst selecting any venue for vacation and tour, tourists’ mentality is shifting due to the physical, financial and mental risks of the pandemic. Tourists are no longer that adventurous about the tour site, accommodation and surrounding arrangements. While planning for a trip, tourists now consider a range of factors, not just the non-monetary value of a trip in terms of enjoyment and hedonic appeal; they now give more priority to the monetary expenditure required to conduct that trip (due to the personal financial stresses they are currently under). This identification explicitly indicates that pricing as a driver of the supply chain should be restructured with new features to establish a resilient supply chain that must be efficient. In the light of the findings on inventory management for a service sector, at present, tourists have become aware of and as such demand certain services and products which were not so important in the past. Knowing this, the inventory of the service providers in every phase of an entire tour, requires an urgent need for several supplementary commodities related to health risk, social isolation, and uncertainty to withstand and move against the strike of current or future bio-threats such as pandemics/epidemics. Among many new features, future tour packages should be furnished with seamless wi-fi, innovative technology and hygiene-related materials. Supply chain resilience is substantially dependent on the availability of this inventory management.

Designing a resilient supply chain is also deeply connected with reforming another significant driver of the supply chain, that of transportation. Findings clearly suggested that reforming this driver should focus on designing an efficient supply chain with a cost-effective multi-faceted transportation system. Experts on innovation and information and communication technology (ICT) acknowledge that usage of technology exponentially expedites access and collect information so that people can acquire a clear and comprehensive picture of the crisis. Information can be thought of as a constructive driver of the supply chain which has felt exponential power during this crisis moment. Lastly, the image of sourcing as a supply chain driver is now keenly verified by tourists for reliability and trustworthiness before planning any future leisure tour. Therefore, sourcing as a driver of the supply chain has received special attention and unexpected momentum nowadays by prospective tourists to consider the entire tour including the mode of transportation, final destination, supplementary amenities, accommodation, food and everything else related to the tour in question.

8 Limitations and future research direction

While capturing prospective tourists’ behavior and attitude, this study conducted an empirical study among prospective tourists in Bangladesh. As this study was not hypothesis driven there is scope for future research, especially data-driven empirical research. Cultural differences can be reflected in tourists’ perceptions and attitudes, which were not considered in this study; thus, future researchers could potentially design and advance this area of study for different country contexts, particularly in developed countries. This study did not categorize the respondents in terms of their age, gender and income but these demographic variables might have a profound impact on the moderators and is something future researchers should consider in terms of their effect in this regard.

Sadly, the effect of this current pandemic is not yet over. There are multiple waves to this pandemic (and genetic mutations) which is creating ongoing uncertainty with scientists still attempting to analyze and predict a potential end point (or what the future holds on how to live with this virus). Therefore, capturing tourists’ attitudes and perceptions is a prediction in terms of what actual behavior will be and if this study has managed to reflect the tourist behavior in an actual context. Future research, both qualitative and empirical, should be conducted after this pandemic is over to better understand from experience consumer behavior and choices in this sector so that lessons can be learnt.

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Tasnim, Z., Shareef, M.A., Dwivedi, Y.K. et al. Tourism sustainability during COVID-19: developing value chain resilience. Oper Manag Res 16 , 391–407 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12063-021-00250-8

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How Supply Chain Issues Are Crushing Hotels — and Your Stay

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For many, supply chain issues mean something like the grocery store is out of oat milk, so you’re stuck with soy instead. For hotels — an industry already hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic — supply chain issues are causing even bigger problems.

Vimal Patel knows this all too well. Patel is CEO of QHotels Management, which operates franchises of hotel brands, including some Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn and Best Western properties. Lately, he’s scrambling to find towels, shampoos, notepads and other supplies his hotels run through (and run out of) due to supply chain problems.

“Ever since the pandemic, serving paper products like plates and napkins, as well as food itself, has become a huge problem — and a customer service challenge,” he says. “Guests often don’t understand why a product is unavailable.”

Things got heated at one of his hotels, which advertises 12-ounce cups of coffee.

“We could only find 8-ounce cups, and we couldn’t find any lids,” Patel says. “We had to use a substandard cup, because that’s all we could get. That was deeply upsetting to some customers.”

For weary travelers seeking to caffeinate, lidless coffee might feel like a reason to leave a one-star review, especially for unpracticed travelers who might not be accustomed to the myriad COVID-related travel changes . But here’s why there’s no point in crying over spilled milk.

How supply chain issues affect your hotel stay

Deliveries can take an unpredictably long time.

Most of Patel’s properties are franchises of larger brands and require conforming to brand standards. Patel typically orders items from an approved vendor, which previously took about 48 hours to arrive.

“Now, it can take months,” he says. “You’re lucky to get it within three weeks.”

Towels are typically reordered every other month, as they get discolored after enough use (and some just disappear). Yet, bulky items like these are tough to stockpile, since most hotels have limited storage space.

“We’ll have a family of four use all the towels in the morning, and then ask for a second set in the evening,” he says. “Sometimes we just don’t have enough.”

Amid the coffee cup shortage, Patel had to send an employee to Costco to buy whatever cups they could find. “With basic necessities, it’s hard to tell a customer, ‘We don’t have that,’ so sometimes you just have to make it work,” he says.

Costs are higher

The entire nation is witnessing inflation — and hotels are no different.

Hotels reported a 79% cost increase on day-to-day cleaning and housekeeping supplies, a 77% increase for linens and other soft goods, and a 77% increase in food and beverage supplies, according to a November 2021 survey of about 500 hotel operators conducted by the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

Staffing issues are ongoing

In a separate AHLA survey from October 2021, 94% of respondents said their hotels are understaffed (including 47% who say they are severely understaffed). Additionally, 96% of hotel operators said they are trying to hire, yet are struggling to fill open positions.

And for an already overworked hotel employee, dealing with a customer upset about their undersize coffee cup can be extra challenging.

Construction challenges compound the problem

The coffee chaos was small beans for Patel’s business, which operates in Louisiana. Nearly half of his properties are closed due to flooding and roof damage in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. He says local home improvement stores are out of materials, and construction workers are tough to hire.

While the hurricane brought extra challenges for Louisiana businesses, hotels nationwide are experiencing construction-related issues. In the first year of the pandemic, many hotels put off planned renovations.

Now, it might be too late to renovate without going over budget. Construction material costs jumped nearly 20% in 2021, according to an analysis by the Associated General Contractors of America. In a separate AGC survey from winter 2021, 90% of contractors attributed such issues to the supply chain, and 72% said projects take longer than anticipated because of COVID-19.

What to expect during your next hotel stay

Travelers are returning, but labor and materials still haven’t — and the outlook isn’t exactly promising. Of the AHLA survey respondents, 36% said they expect supply chain disruptions to last at least another year.

For travelers, that means anticipated renovations might not have even started. It means you might not have the exact amenities you’re used to — and that sometimes, the amenities you expected will not be available, period. Patel says he hopes customers will understand the challenges that the hotel industry faces.

“We’re not cutting corners because we’re trying to nickel and dime,” he says. “It’s simply the situation we’re in.”

And just as a hotel likely wants you to feel like you’re at home, Patel says he hopes people realize the supply chain shortages felt at home are hitting his industry too.

“Whether it’s finding groceries or a roof for your own home — they’re the same challenges that businesses are facing, but 10 times,” he says.

This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.

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Supply Chains and the COVID‐19 Pandemic: A Comprehensive Framework

Ghazi m. magableh.

1 Industrial Engineering Department, Yarmouk University, Irbid Jordan

The Coronavirus pandemic affected activities worldwide, among which the supply chain (SC) disruptions is significant. The impact is expected to affect businesses indefinitely; thus, the SC is unlikely to resume its pre‐COVID‐19 status. This study examines the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on SCs regarding its disruptions, associated challenges, and trend. It conducts an analysis of SCs stages, phases, and manifestations regarding the consequences, opportunities, and developments induced by the pandemic. A framework for the SC with COVID‐19 is presented towards a future global value chain and continuous improvements. It explores and connects the relevant elements to address the relations of SC‐COVID19 (SCC19). This study is novel as it identifies, categorises, and frames the essential factors and their interrelationships in a comprehensive framework. The SCC19 framework can be of value for decision‐makers and researchers, and can be generalised to other industries. Furthermore, study limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Introduction

Global supply chain (GSC) disruptions started after the World Health Oganization (WHO) declared the coronavirus disease outbreak to be global health emergency at the end of January 2020. During the first half of 2020, the virus spread to almost all the countries in partial or total lockdown (McKenzie,  2020 ). Such a crisis affects the supply network at the source and destination, has extreme effects on GSC, and interrupts production process (Choudhury,  2020 ). According to Institute of Supply Management (ISM), about 75% of the companies reported supply chain (SC) disruptions, 80% expected some kind of disruptions in the near future, 62% reported delays in receiving goods, and 53% of firms reported difficulties in getting information from China (McCrea,  2020a , 2020b ). More than five million companies with Tier 2 supplies were impacted by the pandemic (Dun and Bradstreet, 2020). It is estimated that among the 450 million persons working in GSCs, many have faced reduced income or even job loss due to COVID‐19 (Kippenberg, 2020). Globally, organisations have been shutting down shops, deleting orders, and suspending production. Some sectors like garment, mining, jewelry, and automobiles have been suffering as the employees in these sectors are among the most vulnerable and being affected by the pandemic (Kippenberg, 2020).

Traditionally, research has focused on resource allocation and distribution during the pandemic using different approaches such as optimisation (Queiroz et al.,  2020 ). Ivanov and Dolgui ( 2020b ) examined the available literature to conceptualise the ripple effect of the pandemic, focusing on SCs structural dynamics, and derived the managerial implications. Some researchers study and proposed reconfigurable SC by comprehensively merging components taken from resilient, digital, lean, agile, and sustainable SC to adjust to sudden changes (Battaïa et al.,  2020 ; Dolgui et al .,  2020 ). A viable supply chain that balances sustainability, agility and resilience can support the organisation on recovery decisions and rebuild their SC after long standing crises like COVID‐19 pandemic (Ivanov,  2020b ). Some studies have introduced models to solve specific problems with specific applications (Mehrotra et al .,  2020 ). Researchers in the field of operations and management can also contribute to critical economic activities (Gao and Su,  2017 ). Choi ( 2020 ) introduced an analytical model to discover whether technology based logistics management can support the continuity of businesses, while (Gao and Su,  2017 ) proposed a hybrid forecasting technique dependent on nearest supplier and clusters to estimate COVID‐19 growth to help decision‐makers and SC executives to make decisions during the current crisis and future pandemics. Modelling, technology, and organisation raises questions and provides opportunities as the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on SCs continues to be increasingly destructive (Queiroz et al .,  2020 ).

Previous research largely analysed the impact of COVID‐19 on SC performance (Ivanov,  2020a ), focusing on solutions (Rowan and Laffey,  2020 ; Staal,  2020 ) to enhance the decision‐making process and viability (Ivanov and Dolgui,  2020c ), and utilising different tools, like simulation and ISN viability, to resist the pandemic and reach future resilience (Cheng and Lu, ; Golan et al .,  2020 ; Kahiluoto et al .,  2020 ; Ivanov,  2020a ; Ivanov and Dolgui,  2020c ). Studies have also investigated challenges (BESSON,  2020 ), explored SC disruptions (Cheema‐Fox et al .,  2020 ; Craighead et al .,  2020 ; Hobbs,  2020 ), examined SC security and safety issues (Liu et al .,  2020 ), estimated SC losses (Guan et al .,  2020 ), studied SC sustainability (Mari et al .,  2014 ; Hakovirta and Denuwara,  2020 ), evaluated localisation of the supply (de Sousa Jabbour et al .,  2020 ; McCrea,  2020b ), measured for critical goods (Lopes de Sousa Jabbour et al .,  2020 ), and investigated unusual SC events associated with COVID‐19 (Anner,  2020 ; Ivanov,  2020a ).

The future directions for research involve focusing and deepening investigation on SC and the innovation and development accompanying it. Studies should engage with sustainable supply and economic aspects to explore the impact of and to deal with COVID‐19 (Hensel et al .,  2020 ). They can also uncover several future SC trends (Liu et al .,  2020 ), explore the opportunities arising from the pandemic (Staal,  2020 ), focus on the complicated solutions for the shortage of critical products (Rowan and Laffey,  2020 ), and conduct an evaluation of economic effects, the delivery and supply system, as well as the monitoring and improvement policy to combat the possible threats (Gray,  2020 ) and sustain SC with the rapid propagation of the virus and the economic shock (Cheema‐Fox et al .,  2020 ), and understand the SC phenomenon to make the system more prepared for the future crises and risks (Craighead et al .,  2020 ).

The motivation of this study came from the instability and rapid changes in the business environment caused by the disruptions of global businesses and trades, which have been greatly affecting SCs. Such a pandemic requires making rapid decisions in a complex and challenging environment, considering many factors like SC responsiveness, costs and quality. This necessitates companies to set up tools to estimate, assess, respond to, and measure the effect of the pandemic on demand, supply, and, thus, SC. These tools should consider the critical element and different factors related to the SC‐COVID‐19 (SC and COVID‐19 pandemic) relationship to assess and respond to crises and consider solutions that guarantee the continuation of supply and delivery. The proposed framework introduces these components and their interrelationships to help organisations in building their tools and to support their decision‐making process.

This study investigates 75 articles dealing with the impact of the pandemic, its manifestation, and factors related to SC‐COVID‐19 and seek to contribute to SC recovery. It streamlines the literature and explores several new tensions and novel interconnections among various SC‐COVID‐19 factors. Therefore, this study seeks to address key research questions, namely: What are the factors that affect the performance of the supply chain, cause supply disruption, interrupt SC flows, and impact strategies to build end‐to‐end SC capability? What are the recurring, infrequent, and unique phenomena accompanying the COVID‐19 pandemic? How can decision‐makers employ the main interconnected SC‐COVID‐19 factors to overcome this ordeal and face similar crises in the future?

The literature review allows recognising combinations of factors related to SC‐COVID‐19 and could help decision‐makers enable recovery from the ongoing and future similar crises. For the purpose of this study, nine factors and relevant 58 elements are considered in structuring the comprehensive framework. Although many of these elements have evolved from growing topics in the literature as main factors in SC management and operations, the focus has been on their individual contributions to organisational performance and efficiency. This study differs from its predecessors as it tries to arrange, map out, and combine these factors in a comprehensive framework that can be used by researchers in future developments and provides a chance for decision‐makers to contemporise their SCs. This study, thus, pursues the following contributions:

• It seeks to extend the investigation of the pandemic's impact on end‐to‐end GSC, considering the main causes of the disruption, the challenges associated with the pandemic, and the trend of the crises. Moreover, it examines the main interconnected factors leading to the disruption of SC operations: change in supply, fluctuation in demand, and the reaction of governments and countries to confront the pandemic.
• It explores the main SC stages, phases, and manifestations of the crises against its consequences, opportunities, and developments to clarify their interrelationships based on cumulative experience, new businesses, and the economic environment.
• It extends the analysis to comprehend the COVID‐19 consequences, measures, and solutions related to existing SCs. It describes the capability building method and crisis aspects, areas of developments and the principal steps relating to the future global value chain (GVC) and links the cost and continuous enhancements to resist the effect of COVID‐19 and possible future crises.
• Additional contributions comprise the continuous developments methodology to allow SC managers and executives to express requirements, decision‐making process and inputs. The study introduces the triangular pedestal loop of continuous improvements: solutions, decision requirements, and evaluation tool.
• The main structure of the framework interlinks these factors to assure analysis, improvements, and responsiveness to help decision‐makers endorse SCs future flexibility and competition. Other contributions involve an identification of several open research questions to be explored in the future.

The study outcomes and results can be used by logisticians, researchers, policymakers, and specialists in the field of supply chain to assist their organisations in decision support systems during the period of this pandemic and to ensure resistance to future crises. The framework can be extended to other industries and other related sectors.

In particular, this study finds that the outcomes are structured into nine factors: disruptions, cost control, capability building, aspects, facts, phenomena, areas of enhancement, steps towards SC stability, and continuous development. The rationality and practicality of the proposed model components was checked with a few SC and logistics specialists. The study can be used by both researchers and the industry to improve decision support systems and enable readjustment and restoration during the ongoing pandemic and future crises. Further future research directions are introduced and discussed as well.

The rest of the paper is organised as follows. The following section presents the SC and COVID‐19 related literature. The third section discusses the impact of the pandemic on the SCs. The fourth section analyses SC manifestations associated with the pandemic. The fifth section proposes a framework to understand SC systems with COVID‐19 and related solutions. The final section concludes and presents future research suggestions.

Literature review

The complex networks of recent SCs can be exposed to disruptions due to shutdowns, which can be directly or indirectly caused by risk factors from natural, social, political, and economic phenomena (Scheibe and Blackhurst,  2018 ). Pandemic outbreaks are special cases of SC risks with indefinite disruptions, propagation, and considerable uncertainty (Ivanov,  2020a ). Such a crisis is not new, as SC vulnerabilities were exposed during the H1N1 and Ebola outbreaks in 2009 and 2014, respectively, thereby creating a critical demand for necessities. Thus, firms realised that they must quickly respond to current SC disruptions regarding what to produce, for whom, and how it should be produced (Armani et al .,  2020 ).

Today, Chinese SCs are under significant pressure (Chatterjee,  2020 ). Given, the rising global concern for the shortage of critical products like personal protective equipment (PPE), SCs can help supply crucial health care items and help reduce infections. The health care SC is global and requires urgent actions to ensure support to the health care systems during times of crises (Mirchandani,  2020 ). Contingency plans for critical product shortage are, thus, vital (Rowan and Laffey,  2020 ).

The COVID‐19 pandemic has placed the spotlight on SCs and challenged more than 30 years of progress towards globalisation. Moreover, the pandemic coincided with the current trade wars between the USA and China, thus uncovering the instability of GSCs and trading systems. It highlights the need to build more resilient SC operations (Feinmann,  2020 ).

The COVID‐19 outbreak introduced an unprecedented and extraordinary situation for SC resilience (Ivanov and Dolgui,  2020c ), during which SC survivability requires large scale resilience. SC network resilience and its ripple effect give scope for decision‐making. It grants access to short‐ and long‐term performance and behaviour of the network after the disruptions; supports design suitable for sourcing, production, and marketing in preparation for potential disruptions; and maintain competitive advantages in risky surroundings (Li and Zobel,  2020 ; Ivanov and Dolgui,  2020b ).

Companies should consider the ripple effect when investigating their resilience practices. Resilience can mitigate disruptions when considering SC complexity (Birkie and Trucco,  2020 ). SC resilience depends on the capability of rearranging resources to control disruptions (de Sá et al .,  2019 ). Collaborative activities, such as information sharing and communication, enhance SC resilience by improving visibility, quickness, and flexibility (Scholten and Schilder,  2015 ). External and internal SC network can improve SC resilience and customer‐related performance (Asamoah et al .,  2020 ). Increasing redundancy associated with operational flexibility ultimately enhances network resilience; moreover, simulations offer a holistic methodology to evaluate SC resilience (Childerhouse et al ., ).

As the pandemic is expected to progress indefinitely, much will be learned about how SCs respond to the crisis, modify strategies to improve resilience, and maintain customer trust (Hobbs,  2020 ). SC monitoring, proactive development strategies, assessment of economic impacts and delivery systems are necessary to address potential SC threats (Gray,  2020 ). Well known and emerging theories can reduce challenges and provide potential solutions. These theories help scholars study the pandemic, its impact on SC, and support decision‐makers to formulate responses (Craighead et al .,  2020 ).

Instability and rapid changes in the business environment require strategic alliances and inter‐organisational collaboration (Cravens et al .,  1996 ). Multi sourcing, quality, and flexibility can help achieve efficient coordination throughout the network and lead to different levels of collaboration to improve SC integration and sustainability (Kumar et al .,  2020 ; Vlachos and Dyra,  2020 ).

SC policymakers should respond to the spread of COVID‐19 while minimising its impact and maintaining the SCs (Guerin et al .,  2020 ). Decision‐making can be based on available data, demand, and past decisions (Mehrotra et al .,  2020 ). Applications of big data and analytics, machine learning, and digitisation can be applied to crises management activities and efforts (Cheema‐Fox et al .,  2020 ). Lean management practices and sustainability innovations enable SMEs to improve sustainability performance and economic efficiency (Dey et al .,  2020 ). Given that the digital transformation is rapidly and significantly changing business processes (He et al .,  2020 ), digital SC networks must be aligned with business strategies to enable businesses to adjust and recover from future SC disruptions.

Impact of COVID‐19 pandemic on SCs

The COVID‐19 pandemic has significantly impacted end‐to‐end GSC activities, especially medical and food supplies. Thus, the integrity and stability of the value chain (VC) have been compromised. The global media has covered other angles from threats to accusations and even intercepting shipments, where countries scrutinise anything that enters respective territories, given its right to protect people and avoid catastrophe by all means. Such events have profoundly impacted GSCs.

Figure  1 illustrates the impact of the pandemic on SCs. The study considers three main aspects: the main causes of the disruptions, the challenges associated with the pandemic, and the trend of the crises. Three main interrelated factors led to the disruption of the SC operations: change in supply, fluctuation in demand, and the reaction of governments and countries to confront the pandemic.

Impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on SCs

The pandemic affected SC activities, operations, processes, and management due to supply disruptions, demand volatility, and government actions to combat the crisis. Factory closures, border restrictions, travel bans, ports closures, and suspended transportations interrupted the entire supply network, thus leading to shortages. GSCs connected to China, USA, and Europe were greatly affected and induced spikes in many products in response to panic buying, which, in turn, led to price fluctuations, as supplies become limited. High demand and order congestions from the delays resulted in demand vulnerability and shocks, which impacted both offline and online purchases. Furthermore, complex challenges in addressing the massive demand while maintaining quality and continuity persisted. Many countries acted proactively to protect its people and imposed strict restrictions on movements via lockdowns, social distancing, and quarantining measures in the early parts of this year. The tension and panic from such decisions affected SC operations and performance. Government measures led to the decline in production and considerable contractions in international trade flows.

The main challenges associated with the COVID‐19 pandemic include industrial, economic, inflow, on‐hold production, delivery, online shopping, and SC upsets. Components needed to assemble final products are procured from (and assembled in) several locations. They are then re‐exported, transferred, or shipped to specified locations worldwide. Thus, disruption in the SC complicates the process. Supply and demand disruptions, along with governments' responses, contribute to external and internal economic risks in the short‐ and long‐term. Given such disruptions, against the backdrop of government protection measures, several manufacturing plants and factories suspended production. Delivery and distribution faced several challenges, including direct distribution difficulties, increased online orders, re‐staffing of distribution centres (DCs) and warehouses (WHs), and changes in the allocation of inventory across the network and distribution channels to increase responsiveness. Thus, the pandemic proved to be an opportunity for online stores and businesses. Moreover, online shopping increased, especially for food and grocery products. The pandemic changed customer trends, as many of them relied on online shopping and reduced their visits to the retailer centres. Furthermore, there were freight prices spikes, a low travel interest, and increases (decreases) in demand for key products (luxury products), as well as cancelled and extra orders. Thus, organisations are pressured to lay off workers and halt productions.

Most of the world companies are affected by the pandemic; they also report disruptions in their SCs. The main trends of this effect include the following. (1) Prices fluctuate, as the extraordinary increase in prices during the pandemic negatively affect the relationship between suppliers, retailers, and customers. (2) There is a long lead time due to delays in receiving items from the source and delays in distribution. (3) There are delays in shipments, moving cargo, loading, shipping, and unloading, as well as extra delays at the borders and ports. (4) Return, profits, and income reduce, thus hurting retailers' abilities regarding their quality control. (5) Production capacity and manufacturing capability decrease and affects the sources of production. (6) Lack of disruptions plans associated with small inventory levels, single supplier, or minor diversification underestimate the possibility of severe disruptions; the focus on short‐term and costs minimisations lead to a lack of risk information and contingency plan. (7) Moreover, there are difficulties in getting information and data from partners, lack of end‐to‐end visibility, lack of integrations and coordination, and variations in technology utilisation throughout the SC.

In general, global trade and business experience abnormal interruptions, which affect the demand and supply end of the SC. Thus, organisations face significant challenges in maintaining a continuous flow of goods and services.

SCs manifestations

It is too early to evaluate and quantify the total effect of COVID‐19 on the SC disruptions. However, the primary decline in production, business, and trade in China and other industrial nations will strongly impact many countries down the SC as most countries restrict the movement of supplies to combat the spread of the virus.

Figure  2 shows three main stages that characterised the SC: short‐, medium‐, and long‐term shocks and developments. The SCs will go through six phases: supply upset, demand upset, new ordinary, unique time, post‐pandemic, and the opportunity. COVID‐19 manifestations on SCs are briefly discussed, based on their connection with each stage, to clarify the interrelationships. The arrow at the bottom indicates the development of the SC, based on continuous improvements taken from the cumulative experience, new business, and the economic environment.

SCs stages, phases, and manifestations, given COVID‐19

The main SC stages, as shown in Figure  2 , explores the periods of GSC related to COVID‐19 pandemic. All stages are interconnected. Each stage, however, has its own characteristics. SC decision‐makers and managers must consider the disruptions, consequences, and solutions of each stage carefully.

Short‐term stage

Short‐term disruptions lead to a considerable readjustment from the usual supply sources, like China, and result in long‐term benefits to the local industry and domestic sources. The two phases of this stage are supply and demand upsets. Since the availability of raw materials, components, finished products, and items used in the factories were interrupted, organisations strived to fulfil demand requirement at the minimum level or partially. The demand shock began when people started to engage in panic‐driven hoarding of goods. Given the empty warehouses, DCs, retailers, and supply lines, rerouting and redirecting inventories and available products to newly identified priorities and bypassing supply decision systems was a challenge. Human resources are the most crucial components; nonetheless, many factory and service employees were infected. Hence, measures are required to improve continuity, cut costs, produce cash, develop agile SCs, and guarantee the safety of the employees.

Medium‐term stage

The prevalent opinion indicates that recovery from the pandemic and its consequences is here to stay. The phases associated with this stage are new normal and unique time. In this stage, it is necessary to build new supply continuity beyond COVID‐19. When the demands reach a new steady‐state value, there should be production adjustments to reflect the real new demand (whether an increase or decrease), along with the supply lines adaptations. Inventory bounce should be treated carefully to avoid the bullwhip effect. As the length and magnitude of the pandemic remain unclear, the consequences will persist, even after the outbreak is contained. For some companies, the impact will stay longer and worsen without stable GSCs, as well as vulnerable sources. Thus, SCs must review their strategies since the pandemic has introduced unique moments to SC managers, decision‐makers, planners, and regulators to reconsider the global SC model, new supply needs, and dependencies. Moreover, they can realise and develop SCs for the domestic market, SC resilience, and SC visibility. Furthermore, they can strengthen consumer relationships, buffer stock, adjust the planning system, assure continuity, adopt demand and supply changes, modularise production according to demand change, and develop risk management plans.

Long‐term stage

If the crises persist, further SC interruptions on delivery and distribution delays are expected. The phases of this stage represent the post‐pandemic and the opportunity. In the post‐pandemic phase, the crises will speed up the digital transformation of SCs and businesses to address inherent weaknesses and vulnerability. Technology will be the main player in building future SC strategies. Moreover, several methods explored can help businesses generate resilience SCs post‐COVID‐19. The opportunity from the pandemic stems from key technologies that support businesses in making them efficient and capable of handling risks after surviving the crises. Employing digital technologies help build resilient GSCs. Moreover, digital technology, visibility, integration, and collaboration with other partners are crucial to survive a future crisis. Industrial establishments that can modularise production according to demand change could be the norm in the future in supporting the SC network in communications and agility. Moving to the cloud may be necessary to ensure business continuity. Safety is one of the main factors as companies need to consider risk management in any future strategy and planning. Remote working post‐COVID‐19 must be carefully considered, as it will change tradition work processes and operating principals.

SC and COVID‐19 (SCC19) framework

It is clear that the SC‐COVID‐19 perspectives will dominate the researchers in the industry throughout the pandemic effect and recovery era (Ivanov and Dolgui,  2020b ). There are many studies in the literature considering the different risks, impact, and solutions of the pandemic. Moreover, they investigate different tools and techniques like modelling, optimisation, and simulation. The COVID‐19 pandemic resulted in a unique environment of disruption, implications, and risks on SCs, and thus the SC‐COVID‐19 components are affected at different levels and times. With the pandemic's impact, it is difficult to apply the majority of common SC techniques such as risk mitigation, transportation, inventory, and smooth flow of material, money, and information. So, there is a necessity of framing the main component of SC‐COVID‐19 factors and elements with their interconnections to help decision‐makers combat the ongoing and future crises.

The selected literature of the latest contributions is used to explore and connect the relevant elements to address the SC‐COVID‐19 relationship. The studies relevant to SC with COVID‐19 are reviewed towards future resilience and continuous improvements. This selection was complemented with a search in common available database including journal articles, periodicals, publications of international organisations like the WHO and World Bank, and experts' reports. To ensure representativeness of studies, the following rules are used: SC and COVID‐19 is used as the basic search protocol and subsequently, one of the nine factors (disruptions, facts, phenomena, capability building, crisis aspects, steps towards resilience and new normal, areas of improvements, continuous developments, and costs) is added every time there is new search; for example: (SC, COVID‐19, and disruptions), (SC, COVID‐19, cost). The keywords are selected based on an analysis of relevant literature on SC‐COVID‐19.

After narrowing the search and filtering the articles according to the scope of the study, a list of 75 articles related to SC‐COVID‐19 are selected to be used in the study. In each reviewed paper, three factors were selected from the nine that were considered. These factors are arranged in descending order according to the extent of focus on them in the research paper being reviewed.

A detailed article‐by‐article analysis is shown in Table  1 , which shows the major outcomes of the main factors related to SC‐COVID‐19 insights. Table  1 summarises the author(s), title, journal, and the factors of focus. The study focuses on the major insights relevant to supply chains in the context of COVID‐19. The insights are generalised from every single article and classified into nine factors.

Studies related to the proposed SCC19 framework factors

As summarised in Table  2 , the analysis revealed several components that have been effectively applied to SC elements related to the main factors. It was found that each of the nine factors is aligned with several elements. The total number of elements consider in the study is 58, as shown in Table  2 . Such an organisation seemed the most reasonable and convenient manner for constituting the SCC19 framework and conducting further analysis. The SCC19 framework links the components that are composed of the factors and their relevant elements.

Components used in the SCC19 framework

These components are confined by the scope of the framework at the strategic and process levels, which bound the structure required to connect the impact and manifestation associated with SC‐COVID‐19, SC pillars, costs issues, and actions and solutions suggested to determine the areas of improvements and come up with steps towards continuous improvements. However, the model does not elaborate on details regarding other elements like flows, inventory, ordering, and collaboration process as they are accommodated at the operational level. The model comprises the major components required to support decision‐making processes and help researchers implement further analysis.

SC disruptions and recommendations for the future are mentioned in the highest number of publications, followed by the areas of enhancements, SC‐COVID‐19 facts, and SC capability building. Meanwhile, cost control got the lowest number. Based on the reviewed papers, the number of citations per factor is shown in Table  2 . Such an arrangement seemed reasonable and convenient for developing further classifications of the main SC‐COVID‐19 outcomes, and deriving better conclusions and future research guidelines.

SC and pandemic analysis is a huge area and is expected to increase over time. It is clear that there is an urgent need to determine the main factors related to SC‐COVID‐19, their interconnections, and how to utilise the outcomes from different studies to help SC managers evaluate their situation, make their decision, survive the current disruptions, recover and build new normal, and resist future crises. The analysis of SC‐COVID‐19 in the context of the connection among different factors and elements represents a novel study array. Based on the above analysis and findings, the SCC19 framework is structured.

Figure 3 presents the framework to understand the COVID‐19 effect, measures, and solutions related to existing SCs. Initially, SC curators must understand the phenomena that accompanied the spread of the virus. They should then study and realise the interruptions that negatively affected the performance of the existing SC, whether they are constraints, disruptions, and challenges. Thus, to build any short‐, medium‐, or long‐term solutions, including the necessary immediate solutions, it is essential to realise the necessary pillars to support the areas of development, future GVC, and continuous improvement. The first pillar represents capacity‐building to mitigate any future threat to the SC. The second pillar represents the crises aspects for readiness, response, and recovery of the VC, followed by an adequate appreciation of the SC in the pandemic period. These facts should be considered in any developments of plans, procedures, and policies. The next segment represents development areas, which include five main areas necessary to support continuous improvement and ensure continuity, responsiveness, and future SC competition. Furthermore, the necessary steps to ensure the performance and effectiveness of the SC include several steps towards the future SC development. This improvement is a guarantee for resilience towards unknown challenges that often disrupt the SC in crisis situations like COVID‐19. The continuous improvements approach enables SC managers and executives to define requirements, decision‐making and inputs, as well as finds appropriate solutions, associated evaluations, and measurement processes while ensuring that these procedures continue to be revised in the future. The following sectors constitute the main structures of the framework in analysing, improving, and ensuring SC future resilience and competition.

Panic buying, supply disruptions, localisation trends, raw material limitations, and transportation problems, as well as political, social, and health problems associated with the COVID‐19 are the main SC phenomena from the impact of the pandemic. Moreover, the phenomena are accompanied by delivery delays, unpredicted practices, stockpiling, hoarding goods to sell later with inflated prices, reduction in quality assurance of products, reduction in data access, banning exports, and panic‐induced buying. The panic buying phenomenon made the international headlines as it provided the opportunities for fraudsters to fill out the gaps.

SC interruptions

Every SC has its own constraints, such as productions, flows, locations, inventory, and storage constraints. In addition to the normal SC constraints, planning, decision‐making, capability, visibility, quality constraints, capacity, legal, regulation, institutions, sustainability, talent, liquidity, and responsiveness limits the ability of delivery. SC disruptions from government measures and actions significantly impact the global SC chains as they abandon exports, imports, travelling, transportations, and social isolations, in addition to many other restricted actions. SC challenges, such as trade barriers, delivery challenges, suspended operations, social distances, and border restrictions impact SC continuous improvement, strategies, and competitiveness if appropriate measures are not considered promptly with the right tools. Other parts of the segments in Figure  3 help prevent SC interruptions from affecting the SC in the short‐, medium‐, and long‐term regarding the development of future VCs.

SCC19 Framework

The first pillar represents the strategies for building SC capability, which is the main supporter of any SC process, operations, and activities during crises. The second pillar represents crisis aspects, which supports the future reliance of SC and prevent disruptions from aborting SC operations and continuity.

Ten success strategies help build SC capability to maintain SC operations, given the COVID‐19 pandemic. These strategies include planning, integration, optimisation, digital collaboration, rapid insights, quality test, empowered SC team, correct ERP system, network agility, and reliable supply. Companies should ensure a reliable and predictable supply and attain the greatest value from suppliers. Diversification of supply base and sourcing strategies must focus on returning to full production beyond the outbreak. Building for rapid generation of insights allows SCs to respond to changes and shocks. Resilience in SC operations is a key factor for the success of many strategies. It empowers SC teams and involves all staff in the supply chain management. Decentralised teams can respond quickly to insights and generate recovery capabilities to disruptions. A correct ERP system is a necessary component with many industrial systems to eliminate the use of manual systems. Moreover, if the organisation already has an ERP system, they should use an advanced system to increase the production with efficiency improvements. An adaptive, flexible, and agile SC network with quick planning and integrated implementation should be formed. Dynamic planning capability may ensure agility for SC changes and enable continuous, dynamic SC modifications and adjustments to respond to the changes quickly and efficiently. Digital collaboration increases with information sharing enhanced by cloud technology, collaborative base, and suitable tools. Optimisation of product designs and management for supply, production, and sustainability will speed up the advancement of innovations. Innovation is crucial for competition and can be reflected in the design of the product regarding price, time, and location. Embedded sustainability into SC operations is a crucial success factor. SCs should be aligned with business objectives by integrating trades and operations with business planning. In any strategy, resources planning is the key to improving SC success. Failing to plan resources requirements lead to delays in deliverables and delivery, reduction in quality, overtime, and a reduction in consumers' satisfaction.

The crisis is discussed here from four aspects, including impact, readiness, response, and recovery. Operations were affected by different levels like volume decline, transit delay, inadequate capacity, delivery delay, late payments, cancelled credit lines, inconsistent demand quantity, and increased costs. Moreover, there was a delay in communication with sources and shippers.

Organisations require the development of readiness capability while decreasing the decision uncertainty during response and recovery. Companies may build readiness through three main phases: development, assessment, and finalising. Response plans should determine actions to minimise and shorten the length of the disruption and its effect on SC. The consideration of available resources (human, financial, and assets) is required to accomplish the plans. Further, recovery comprises the prevention strategies and policies, control measurements, treatment programs, manpower management, and disruption elimination.

SCs will adapt, and businesses and the economy usually find a way to survive adverse situations. Thus, the SC must be restructured for alterative SC suppliers to initiate more redundant SCs. Current trends indicate that firms are working towards reliance on local and regional sources and have become more responsive to disruptions. The COVID‐19 pandemic is different from any other black swan event and affects both demand and supply, simultaneously. The crisis gives scope for exploring the necessity of joint working. Many countries and organisations are convinced that stabilising their SCs require nearby local or regional sources. Joint working by sharing information and understanding suppliers in the SC promotes good preparations for future crisis.

Areas of enhancement

Organisations should first focus on short‐term solutions and management to recover and enable the continuity of flows. They may hold operation and activities for a while, such as money transfer, resources exchange, cooperative applications, and systems developments and technology deployment until they recover and resume work. The long‐term plan should focus on solutions and strategies to mitigate matching future events. The fields of improvements include visibility and monitoring, adoption of emerging technology, blockchain technology, automation, and digitisation and transparency.

The visibility of the inventory in the entire SC allows organisations to integrate their efforts, database, and decision process for the necessary flexibility and agility to react to rapid changes, speed up processes, and reduces costs. Several technologies rapidly change the SC process, such as 3DP, IoT, predictive technology, cloud computing, big data and analytics, and autonomous systems. Industry 4.0 technologies, SC 4.0, and augmented reality can expedite SC digital transforming. Blockchain technology encourages suppliers to share data and ensure data confidentiality. Moreover, it should quickly be implemented since disruptions may happen anytime. Automation systems in the workflow, process, and operations increase the agility of replenishment. Automation greatly impacts the SCs and continues to reshape the costs of sourcing, especially in production lines that are suited to automation like electronics. SC digitisation should be integrated as part of its design. Digitisation enables risk management and business continuity as part of the entire business strategy.

Forward steps towards SC stability

There are six main forward steps towards SC stability. They include start‐up solutions to guarantee the recovery from the first shock, short‐ and medium‐term measures to assure the continuity of flows, and the recovery from the pandemic disruptions, as well as transforming the SC to face challenges. Moreover, the key steps for more SC resilience include reshaping the SC based on the technologies, lessons learned, best practices, and building the future SC model to combat current and future crises.

Any start‐up solution should consider the economic effect and direct impact on sources and supplies, escalations in prices, and the employees' safety and income. Start‐up solutions may include an electronic platform to connect with entities that can transport cargo across the country. An immediate business model should be built to make SCs more effective, transparent, increase logistics capacity, and reduces the travel time as much as possible. Organisations should make sure of correct procedures for a strong protection system for workers in line with international standard and social security.

Measures to respond to short‐medium change and protect SC operations include the following. Train employees about COVID‐19 symptoms, precaution, prevention, and protection. Concentrate on human resources planning and strategies with work flexibility to allow for remote work. Organisations should efficiently make sure of the IT system infrastructure, networks, and its suitability for a seamless flow of operations. Supply networks should focus on direct suppliers, reduce extended supply networks, and supply from closer sources. Organisations should employ digital methods to build supplier networks and visibility for critical SC activities.

Flexibility is necessary to prepare for smooth factory closure. Moreover, production rescheduling and agility must be emphasised to prepare for global scenario planning, and a rebound as production is moved to another location within the SC network. Experts can introduce innovative and agile solutions like mobile production entity. It is important to update the plans frequently, including supply, demand, impacted markets, and the virus controlled or spread locations.

Many organisations and businesses have been forced to transform their SC model to a flexible and responsive one. New technologies and digital SC could assist organisations to oversee their entire supply network from routing, rerouting, destination change, and bypass process to guarantee the continuations of flows.

Organisation recovery varies based on SC risk management, disruptions mitigation plans, business strategies, geographical area (close suppliers, factories, and industry in the region), reliance on multi suppliers and sources, and stock size to buffer against SC instability.

The new normal is necessary to guarantee refreshments, prevent productions and industry shutdown, and generate the ability to face shocks to be more reliable, secure, and responsive after the experience.

Three key factors make SCs more resilience: SC visibility, digitisation, and data confidentiality for suppliers. During crises, visibility via SC is vital to understand the impact on the rest of the SC network so that other partners can plan and take actions like evolving routes to other sources. Digitising SC will create more resilience to future disruptions. Organisations should initiate a digital transformation to make the process more efficient and secure. Blockchains could be the solution to satisfy confidentiality and encourages suppliers to share information, contribute to SC, and increase visibility, thus leading to a resilient SC.

Beyond COVID‐19, SC resilience is the key to recover from the global crises. It is reshaping SCs and sectoral activities via recovery lessons to long‐term resilience. GSCs will require restructuring to ensure business goals and objectives are met. GSCs must avoid prolonged economic suffering and distress. Moreover, coordination policies could be a promising path to recovery from the crisis.

Risk elements are interconnected with geopolitical, social, and regulatory uncertainties, especially with the global economy. Organisations should study the potential risks in other countries and regions to specify the actions and plans that will appropriately protect against these risks. Organisational recovery will vary based on their SC risk management. Understanding risk divers, priorities, and solutions is the best way to plan for a future risk management system. Organisations must quickly arrange for inventory and cash flow during SC crisis to mitigate the risks of SC critical disruptions.

Crucial elements for future SCs include intelligent procurements, SC control tower, SC data management with intelligent automation and analytics, supplier risk management, and SC simulation. Intelligent procurements help companies know where and when to supply based on previous procurements, commodity pricing, industrial trends, and machine learning systems. SC control tower allows for the visibility of the external SC environment, the entire SC, trading partners. SC data management with intelligent automation and analytics based on accurate real‐time data about SC transactions without redundancy is one of the keys for the future GVC. Further, SC simulation could model and optimise new strategies changes.

Cost control

Given the pandemic, SC cost control and management is vital to support business objectives amid the increases and change in demand and financial volatilities. SC costs impact most of SC decisions and business. Decision‐makers try to manage margins and improve liquidity during the crisis. Thus, it is crucial to reshape SC costs in an innovative way to confront future growth and organisational agility. All businesses and SCs are worried about sudden changes in their tariffs, currency changes, currency depreciation, taxes, drops in revenues, operations and capital strategies, and conducting trade‐offs of cost reduction in various areas of SC. Such concerns are important for SC managers, executives, and decision‐makers for the future. Organisations that invest in high flexible SCs and resilience to reduce the product development cycle can adjust faster to market changes. Moreover, their revenue will increase.

Continuous developments

SCs have no choice but to evolve, and organisations require additional innovation to prepare for the future. Continuous development is a vital way to prepare for future crisis. It requires decision inputs, solutions, and evaluation tools.

Decision‐making requires the reconsideration of the GSC strategy, the demand impact specific to businesses, and the utilisation of SC experts. Given COVID‐19, additional decision‐making requirements include open‐source COVID‐19 data, real‐time SC data, and demand change per region or country, considering the opportunities and drawbacks of each decision. Thus, developing and enhancing SC excellence requires decision‐making skills, analytics capabilities, understanding costs and constraints, and business capability to support SC continuity to become a right business partner in the SC.

Solutions amid the pandemic include sourcing diversity, online delivery, contracts revision, sustainability, government support, and continuous development. Solutions can be implemented in steps as follows. Develop contingency plans with scenarios for different demand surroundings and changes. Reduce supply shock by working closely with the current suppliers and diversifying the sources. Arrange for demand volatility by mitigating panic buying, supporting retailers, promoting a safe work environment, protecting SC employees via investments, making PPEs available, and looking ahead to facilitate the resumption of business. Solutions require communication to manage time, availability, and safety.

Organisations require the establishment of a tool to evaluate, assess, and measure the effect of COVID‐19 on demand, supply, and, thus, the SC. The challenging times call for the latest analytics solutions. Many companies use software to analyse situations during crises and make decisions. Organisations’ evaluation tools may include software, analytics programs, group meeting, expert interviews and opinions, prioritising products, and best scenarios. Furthermore, validation of the decision‐making and solutions can employ benchmarking.

The framework was discussed with several experts in logistics and supply chain systems (two procurement specialists, two academicians, and three managers from companies specialising in global trade in Jordan). Trade companies are import and export firms that usually deal with bids to supply the local market with imported products. The nine factors that were adopted in the framework were reviewed, along with their interactions, by the experts. They emphasised the framework's applicability, the importance and effectiveness of the framework in reducing the impact of the pandemic on the performance of the supply chain in the short and long run. They also emphasised the effectiveness of the continuous development steps outlined in the framework. They focused on the importance of the framework in assisting managers in making decisions and planning for the supply chain in light of the pandemic and the post‐pandemic status, until it reaches the new normal. They also stressed the need to keep pace with these changes by utilising emerging technologies that help to overcome future crises, such as 3D printers and smart systems, and to increase reliance on local and nearby sources within the global supply chains. Their comments on areas of improvement ranged from adding new areas to rearranging them according to their priority. They added that an implementation of the framework must be accompanied by supportive government measures and the cooperation of the private sector, to facilitate and support the provisioning measures. They also stressed the need to identify the main SC‐COVID‐19 solutions and arrange them according to the priority of implementation and their importance in overcoming the crisis. They mentioned that these measures could lead to the stability of the supply chain and the aforementioned factors should be taken into consideration by decision‐makers at all levels.

COVID‐19 underlined the necessity to transform traditional SC models. During a ‘black swan’ event like COVID‐19, a strong understanding of the factors that could help organisations to initiate the correct plan to face the unexpected. New forms of tools can play a critical role in assisting SC managers view the potential SC‐COVID‐19 risks and use the framework to take corrective actions to ensure better SC flows. The multi‐factor framework enables enhanced characterisation of the complexity of SC‐COVID‐19, and therefore it offers support for more cognisant professional decision‐making regarding investing in improving SC stability. The observed results could help decision‐makers and managers make better decisions regarding the current and future crises.

The COVID‐19 pandemic disrupted global business and trades, thus severely affecting SCs. The shutdown of factories and disrupted the VCs left many businesses struggling to source materials and fulfil demand. Most organisations reported SC disruptions in their capacity because of the pandemic. It is challenging for a planner to prepare for crises, such as the COVID‐19 pandemic. Such crises require rapid decisions in a complicated and challenging environment, given SC costs and quality.

The effects are unlikely to stop soon. It will reasonably continue to affect businesses and trade policies for a long time. SCs will not be the same post‐COVID‐19. The shocks of the panic and the resulting economic impact led to a disruption in most of the GSCs. Generally, the pandemic impacted SCs and their management in several critical capacities. Many companies are continually analysing and tracking new trends in the SC and procurement process. Organisations that take steps to mitigate risks are better prepared to face future challenges. Companies that diversified their suppliers are poised to overcome the impact of the pandemic on SCs.

The COVID‐19 outbreak disrupted many businesses and related SC operations. Motivated by the findings of the literature analysis, the study examines the contribution by answering fundamental questions including: the factors impacting the performance, interrupting flows, and building SC end‐to‐end capability; the recurring and unique phenomena associated with COVID‐19 and their short‐medium‐long term consequences, opportunities, and developments; and how SC managers and decision‐makers can utilise the SC‐COVID‐19 framework components to face such crises, existing and future.

This study examined 75 articles on coping with the impact, manifestation, and factors connected to SC‐COVID‐19 and those that might contribute to SC recovery. Streamlining the literature uncovered several new prospects and novel interconnections among several SC‐COVID‐19 factors. The initial outcomes revealed that each factor or element was discussed thoroughly, but there is no congregation of these factors in a single study or framework.

This study differs from its predecessors as it tries to integrate different elements and factors together in a comprehensive framework. For this purpose, we first analysed the impact of COVID‐19 on SC operations and performance in terms of its disruptions, associated challenges, and new trends, and subsequently investigated SC manifestations arranged in three phases: short, medium, and long term. Finally, we build the framework based on the nine factors to explore the elements that could help decision‐makers withstand and recover from the ongoing as well as similar crises in the future. In addition, the framework introduced the triangular pedestal of continuous improvements: solutions, decision requirements, and evaluation tool. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first to combine and emphasise the impact, phenomena, and propose a multi‐factor multi‐step framework for SC‐COVID‐19. It also contributes to the literature by defining the components of SCC19: disruptions, facts, phenomena, capability building, crisis aspects, costs control, areas of improvements, steps, and continuous developments towards SC resilience and the new normal. It provides a road map (enhancement areas and steps) to resist the ongoing and future crisis.

SCC19 frames the essential elements, understands their structure, sequences, and captures their relations. SCC19 can assist decision‐makers to build SCs that can respond adaptively and help organisations to guide their decisions on surviving, recovering, improving, and rebuilding their SCs beyond global long‐term crises like the COVID‐19 pandemic. The initial rationality and applicability of the model was checked with several experts in the field of logistics and SC systems.

Though it is early to evaluate and measure the entire effect of COVID‐19 on SCs, the study provides several implications to help SC managers better understand the interrelation between these factors and pandemic and boost the decision‐making process. Firms' practitioners can estimate the enhancement areas and steps towards resilience based on the environment and phenomena associated with the pandemic. This allows the evaluation of the post‐pandemic behaviour to help them reassert new normal and ensure continuous improvements against a risky environment. Our results evidently identify the main factors and elements related to SC‐COVID‐19 and propose the interrelationships between the components constituting the framework to support policymakers making proactive decisions.

In conclusion, the study explores the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on SCs be discussing the causes of disruptions, related challenges, and the trend of the pandemic. SC stages, phases, and manifestations of COVID‐19 were analysed. Moreover, the consequences, opportunities, and developments to explore the interconnections between different elements depend on aggregate experience, benchmarking, and a new business environment. A comprehensive SCC19 framework explores the interrelationships between the three factors of SC interruptions and the resulting facts and phenomenon from the crisis. Descriptions of the capability building process and crisis aspects are presented regarding SC resilience. Areas of improvements and the main steps concerning the future GVC were presented and linked to the cost control and continuous improvements to survive the impact of COVID‐19 and potential future crises.

The continuous developments methodology allows SC managers and executives to express requirements, decision‐making process and inputs, in addition to finding the appropriate solutions, related evaluations, and measurement practices while make sure of the continuous revisions in the future. The main structures of the framework interlinked these factors to assure the analysis, improvements, and responsiveness to help decision‐makers endorse SCs future flexibility and competition.

Perhaps, COVID‐19 will lead a new era and revolution in the SCs, and the time is ripe to review the performance and evaluation of the GSCs. Among the most important results of this crisis is the increased focus on the local and regional SCs. Investment in local SCs has several benefits but no company that can operate alone. Thus, GCSs remain necessary.

Given the COVID‐19 pandemic, organisations must encourage more information sharing, communications, and visibility regarding SCs. Technologies and enabling plans and procedures will help rebuild the SC system and improve its resilience in the future. Technology, digital SC, and visibility through the VC and blockchain supply should be a priority for future SCs.

Nevertheless, there are several limitations which include narrowing the literature review and limiting the factors to those extracted from the reviewed articles. Consequently, the analysis may miss some key components influencing the SC‐COVID‐19 relationship. This research is limited by the scarcity of the number of studies related to a comprehensive analysis of SC‐COVID‐19. There are studies that may not have been published and, thus, are still outside the review. The framework may benefit from empirical studies and application of the study in real SCs as well. In general, development of logistics systems is challenging and requires a long time due to the complexity involved.

It is expected that the novel identification and categorisation of factors and elements proposed in the framework with their connections and relations will be of value for practitioners, managers, and researchers in directing SCs during and after the pandemic. The framework is constructed with a generalised view to be utilised by other industries and professionals to survive the current pandemic and to resist and recover from future crises. The framework application can be extended to other industries and related sectors.

Utilising the analysis of the SCC19 framework and literature review findings and outcomes, there are several opportunities for future research directions as follows:

• Extend the literature review to include new factors and elements to support the framework comprehensiveness. Future studies may focus on developing and testing new models, frameworks, and components related to SC‐COVID‐19 to build a tool to improve DSS. Further, they may extend the knowledge of how SCC19 influences the DSS and performance of organisations.
• The proposed framework can be extended by incorporating more complexity and more components; empirically testing the framework with quantitative data to validate and generalise the findings, and checking the impact on different business performance; developing SC‐pandemic plans to enhance coping strategies and achieve organisational goals; or considering the interrelationship between the framework components in the geographical context.
• Investigate the emerging technologies that can lead to continuous development and help SC recovery and withstand future pandemics. Moreover, they may explore changes brought about by digital transformation and other emerging technologies like AI, 3D printers, and machine learning.
• Stimulate the solutions towards future resilience and the new normal. Further, these may be ranked according to their importance and priorities of implementation. The solutions should be emphasised and ranked based on their effect and importance in resisting the ongoing and future crises. Subsequently, the tools required to implement the solutions need to be identified.
• Explore the opportunities associated with the pandemic. For example, the studies may investigate the impact of localisations and supply from different suppliers and suppliers from nearby locations, on the stability of the SC. They may also study the spikes in online buying resulting from both personal safety measures and governmental measures to minimise the spread of the virus.

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What AI means for travel—now and in the future

“Revenge travel.” It’s what a lot of people are doing these days—hitting the runways in big numbers to make up for travel time lost during the pandemic. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast , McKinsey partners Alex Cosmas and Vik Krishnan join global editorial director Lucia Rahilly to discuss a new report on travel in the age of AI : what the technology’s promise and pitfalls are and what it may mean for the travel industry overall.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Roberta Fusaro and Lucia Rahilly.

The promise of AI

Lucia Rahilly: Much of the research for the report drew from interviews with executives at 17 companies across five types of travel businesses. One of those executives is Luca Zambello, CEO of Jurny—an AI-fueled hospitality platform. He says AI will be the new normal.

Luca Zambello: We’re at the very beginning of the hockey stick. Economically, we are at the start of what is potentially the biggest technology disruption that humanity has ever seen.

Lucia Rahilly: So everyone is talking about the disruptive juggernaut that is AI, and particularly gen AI [generative AI]. At a super-high level, and acknowledging that we’re still in early days, what do we expect this to mean for the travel industry in particular?

Vik Krishnan: The travel industry is unquestionably going to be significantly disrupted by AI. Whether it’s gen AI or other forms of AI that have been around for some time remains to be seen. It’s quite clear that if you work through the customer journey and the process of trying to understand where you want to go, where you want to stay, what are the things you want to see, how you want to plan your day-by-day itinerary, gen AI significantly eases the process of travel discovery.

If you then step into what this means for travel suppliers, which includes airlines and hotels and cruises and car rentals and rideshare providers, the promise of AI is very much to help them deliver on the promises, both explicit and implicit, that they make to their customers.

Gen AI significantly eases the process of travel discovery.

What I mean by that is, very often, the expectations of travel are that your flight is on time, your bags get delivered to you safely, you then get to your hotel, your hotel room is available to check into when you get there, and you have a room that provides exactly what you asked for. That baseline expectation is one that many travel companies have historically struggled to meet.

What AI can do is help airlines ensure that planes are on time. It can help hotels ensure that what they deliver in terms of staffing and the product promise is consistent with what they advertise in their marketing and branding strategies.

Alex Cosmas: Not only is travel and hospitality the world’s largest sector, but it’s actually the most intimate sector. That means the answer for each of us to what a good experience looks like—whether I’m traveling for leisure or for business—is, by definition, fundamentally different. And the promise of AI has been to take the pattern of history, take the pattern of millions, and boil that down to the individual response that is relevant to me as a segment of one.

Nowhere is that promise needed more than in travel, where the experience should be a segment of one. That’s what makes it magical. To be clear, AI is already being applied in the travel sector in spades—specifically, in the operation of schedule assets and the optimized allocation of rooms and crews. That’s been true for decades, and it’s only getting better.

But the customer-facing applications of AI are only now really becoming next-generation. And for the most part, in travel, the best AI applications will largely be opaque to customers, because they’ll still be delivered through the mediums that customers prefer: often through humans, through the front line, through desk agents, through guest agents.

AI is already being applied in the travel sector in spades—specifically, in the operation of schedule assets and the optimized allocation of rooms and crews.

That’s ideally the promise. But the starting point is to say we can’t suddenly expect that customers will prefer to interact through more digital channels than they have in the past. Travel is a very human-centric business. And so the best AI, the best models, will be delivered through traditional channels.

How AI can change travel—for the better

Lucia Rahilly: What kind of value might come from using gen AI in the travel industry?

Alex Cosmas: Our latest estimates suggest that gen AI alone, across sectors, is bound to unlock $2 trillion to $4 trillion of incremental value.

Lucia Rahilly: Wow.

Alex Cosmas: Therefore, not surprisingly, capital is chasing the disruptive sector of AI.

Lucia Rahilly: What are some good examples of products that customers might expect to be using or that might be in the background enhancing customers’ experiences in the future?

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Vik Krishnan: Imagine the last time any of you tried to book a trip. You probably started on a search engine such as Google, or you started at an online travel agent such as Expedia, or you started at an actual supplier website if you had some certainty on what airline you wanted to fly or which hotel you wanted to stay at. You probably started with a little box where you put in your destination, you put in your approximate dates, and then you had the search engine present to you a series of results that may or may not have met your needs.

What we’re imagining in a future with gen AI or AI in general is that you start with something much more free-form and say, for example, “I’m looking to plan a trip with my family to New Orleans for a week in October. Can you help me find a hotel that has a pool for my seven-year-old and is within walking distance of the French Quarter?”

Wouldn’t that experience be much easier in terms of trying to figure out where you want to stay and what you want to do, as opposed to getting a list of a thousand hotels in an order that may or may not meet your specific preferences and what you actually want out of that trip? It is one of the most obvious examples wherein customers can see a real difference in what gen AI can do to help them with the travel discovery process.

Alex Cosmas: The other application of AI that I’m excited about is this: every customer gives tells. They drop digital breadcrumbs of things they like and don’t like when they bounce off of the page of a dot-com when they’re shopping; when they abandon a cart; when they return less frequently to search; when they arrive on a page only to check a single itinerary on a single day, on a single fare, rather than browsing for 20 minutes.

All of these are small tells that we as consumers provide travel brands. And so the ability to record, “I actually know what Alex is keen on in general and frankly less keen on and less likely to convert on,” and turn that into relevant offers is really important.

AI is only part of the answer

Lucia Rahilly: Where are we in terms of companies really embracing the use of this next-gen AI and other related technologies?

Alex Cosmas: We’re pretty far down the path of companies both embracing traditional AI and experimenting with gen AI. Very few of the airlines, hotels, cruise lines, and suppliers that I’ve interacted with are not already embracing deployment and actively experimenting with advanced tech. It’s only going to grow.

But there is risk. More is not always better. Faster is not always better. There’s a bit of, let’s say, a cautionary tale that we’ve learned from other sectors, which is that first off, AI is only part of the answer.

I like to say it doesn’t matter if you got the answer right if you got the delivery wrong.

The digital-delivery mechanism is how I go about delivering the answer: a mobile app, a push notification, an e-commerce experience, a kiosk, digital signage, or data just given to the front line. Those mechanisms are as equally important as or, I’d argue, even more important than the predictive and gen AI models behind them.

Vik Krishnan: To build on Alex’s point about getting the delivery wrong, many of you listening have probably been on an airplane in the last year. How many times have you experienced the outcome of landing, pulling toward the gate, stopping short on the tarmac somewhere, and it turns out the gate’s not available yet. Therefore, you have to wait for the other aircraft to taxi out, so your plane can then pull into the gate.

The reality is that putting together an operational execution plan involves data from so many different sources that aren’t necessarily pulled together in a large model. So it doesn’t necessarily enable or unlock this type of orchestration. And this is where AI can be enormously helpful.

There are companies out there that try to understand turning an aircraft, which is the process of essentially getting it from arrival to departure for the next flight. That involves actions both above the wing—for example, getting passengers off and onto the plane, getting the aircraft catered—and below the wing—for example, getting bags on and off the plane.

It involves refueling aircraft. It involves a number of other maintenance-related and ground-handling-related activities that many consumers don’t see. All of that is an extremely delicately orchestrated ballet that happens at an airport every single day, while involving multiple third parties and several different suppliers. It involves a fuel provider. It involves a ground handler. In some instances, it involves a different gate agent than the airline itself. That orchestration requires data and communication of very, very large volumes of information.

There are companies out there that are now saying, “We can actually identify when, during an aircraft turn, something didn’t happen according to schedule.” In other words, that catering truck didn’t pull in three minutes after arrival as it was expected to, which induced a delay. And that delay then allowed for a replanning of the entire turn process, so as to deliver an on-time departure. AI has an extremely large role to play in helping deliver on that promise in a way that suppliers have historically struggled to.

Don’t be AI stranger

Lucia Rahilly: In order to deliver on that process, understanding the data is critical. Here’s Ella Alkalay Schreiber, the GM of fintech at Hopper.

Ella Alkalay Schreiber: Machine learning is important, gen AI is important, predictive AI is important—but the actual challenge is to understand the data, ask the right questions, read prediction versus actual, and do this in a timely manner. The actual challenge is the human thinking, the common sense.

Lucia Rahilly: “Know your customer” is really a business axiom at this point. What does understanding your customers mean specifically for the travel industry?

Alex Cosmas: It means a few things. AI models learn the same way humans learn. It’s a test-and-learn process. I ask a question. I observe a behavior. That reinforces either my false or positive conception of who you are and what makes you tick. If you can’t measure cause and effect precisely, then avoid running an experiment entirely.

This is what our general advice is to our clients. I’d rather they experiment correctly on something small than swing for the fences and have no idea where the ball lands. That’s particularly true in microexperiments, where I have individual customers, where I provide individual treatments, but I have to be able to measure the response. If you can’t measure it, don’t bother. Focus your energy and resources on a different experiment.

This is what our general advice is to our clients. I’d rather they experiment correctly on something small than swing for the fences and have no idea where the ball lands.

If a brand, for example, doesn’t have the digital tech to be able to send a tailored offer to me as an individual, then you don’t really need to know my personal willingness to pay. In that case, stick to the microsegment or the macrosegment and take action that way. If you can’t send a personalized message without making it feel generic, then don’t.

Vik Krishnan: The experience of hyper-personalization has to feel authentic. So in other words, a flight attendant coming up to you and saying, “Hey, I know you normally like a Diet Coke with a slice of lime. Is that what you’d like this time?” is different from presuming what your preferred drink might be. That might be an example of how AI actually delivers on hyper-personalization, but with a bit of a human touch so it doesn’t appear creepy.

Lucia Rahilly: Both of you are deep in this industry. Any examples that come to mind of companies that are really doing AI right? And if so, how?

Vik Krishnan: Hotels that actually understand or acknowledge your past history of staying at that specific property—that’s quite a personal touch I really appreciate. But the reality is many hotels struggle to even understand basic facts such as the frequency, duration, and purpose of a recent stay. Many hotels don’t easily make that type of information available to their frontline staff. And so empowering those employees to use that information to deliver a hyper-personalized greeting or experience is a good example of companies using AI well.

Alex Cosmas: If done right, the frontline workforce should look and feel like superheroes powered by AI. There’s a luxury fashion retailer that arms its sales associates with iPads to link shoppers to the styles and the sizes they searched for online. That’s pretty cool. Now, augment that with the propensity models in the background that give the agent a steer to what a customer wants, and suddenly they appear clairvoyant. Think about that application in travel. There are far more interactions on average in a travel journey.

So as consumers, how do we preserve the magic of travel, which is more about heads-up time and being immersed in our surroundings, rather than about heads-down time and researching on a device? It means more agents who surprise and delight; say, “Welcome back”; say, “Happy birthday”; know you arrived earlier than planned; and swap the room preemptively so you could get in and get on your way. And that’s what we call knowing your customers like you know your friends.

I’ll share one example. When I check into a hotel, I really don’t like the kiosk and the app check-in. But I love it for checking out. For other customers, the complete inverse is true. My hotel can know that. It certainly knows how I check in and check out. It should act on that or understand the why, just as you understand your friends. This is the test-and-learn experiment that we talked about earlier and that most suppliers can begin right now.

AI and talent: What’s next?

Lucia Rahilly: Alex, that makes a very nice segue to Christiaan Hen, chief customer officer at Assaia, talking about frontline talent using AI as an assistant.

Christiaan Hen: Sometimes, people say automation might be a risk to people’s jobs, but that’s not the case here, because there are not going to be enough people to do these jobs in the first place. I like to see it as we’re equipping people with the right tools to do their jobs in a better way to accommodate for the additional workload that is coming.

Lucia Rahilly: This clip invokes the palpable fear that AI and automation will eliminate people’s jobs. We hear that time and again. How do you see these advanced technologies changing things for the front line in the travel industry?

Vik Krishnan: I see technology helping frontline employees do a better job more than I see it eliminating those jobs. We don’t necessarily see, for example, AI reducing flight attendant staffing any time soon, because those flight attendants are on the airplane to provide primarily for your safety, followed by the guest experience.

We see AI in many instances allowing those flight attendants to deliver a better customer experience, because they know that passenger in seat number 17C better as a result of the information provided to them. But it’s not replacing their jobs.

In certain pockets of the economy, technology and AI will end up replacing people. The reality in travel, though, is that the quality of the guest or passenger experience for so many people is tied to human interaction. Consequently, we don’t necessarily see a large-scale replacement of people here by technology and AI.

Alex Cosmas: Let’s look at the facts for a moment. Post-COVID-19, the travel sector employs 12 percent fewer staff than pre-COVID-19. And that’s not necessarily by choice. It is hard to find folks with the hospitality gene who genuinely want to deliver for guests, engage with them, and serve at the highest level day in and day out.

That’s part of the reason we see a smaller workforce in travel today than we have in the past. It takes twice as long, an average of five to six weeks, to fill roles as it did before the pandemic. Those with that hospitality gene would love nothing more than spending less time fixing broken itineraries, fixing issues that frankly could be automated. They’d rather spend their energy serving, which is what travel and hospitality is all about.

It should be a net-positive growth. The travel sector itself should grow as a result, creating jobs. We estimate the travel sector to grow at roughly 6 percent over the next decade, which is twice the rate of the overall economy.

Lucia Rahilly: Could AI and related technologies help with training folks who don’t come by that gene naturally but could be trained to fill those roles more efficiently?

Alex Cosmas: Absolutely. We’re already seeing applications of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI coming together to offer more efficient ways to enhance and accelerate employee training, because you can throw live, immersive scenarios in front of employees at a higher clip than they would get organically on the job.

Oftentimes, the same is true not just of the front line but also of training corporate and call center employees. AI can learn from the patterns of thousands upon thousands of call-ins and transcripts—which no single human can ever be expected to go through—boil them down to the top ten core issues and suggest outcomes that seem to resolve 70 percent of situations. That’s the power of AI in training.

Lucia Rahilly: Alex, you mentioned virtual reality. Would travel drop if you could experience Bhutan from your sofa rather than actually having to take an arduous flight?

Alex Cosmas: Here’s my honest read on it. We’ve been able to visit Bhutan virtually for over a decade through YouTube and through National Geographic . And yet, travel is at an all-time high. And it’s because we all, as social animals, continue to enjoy experiencing new things, meeting new people, hearing new stories, and being inspired by a new site’s history and cuisine.

The numbers also suggest that we are in an unprecedented growth phase for travel. We are also in a phase where, over the past 15 years, customer satisfaction has steadily grown, despite how much we all like to beat up on our travel suppliers.

Consumers are admitting that the area they want to splurge on in the next year is travel and hospitality, such as experiences and restaurants. So they’re giving us that gift of their wallets and their trust. We have to deliver on that expectation as a sector. Gen AI, traditional AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, and digital technologies are going to help us deliver on the promise.

Alex Cosmas is a partner in McKinsey’s New York office. Vik Krishnan is a partner in the Bay Area office. Lucia Rahilly is the global editorial director and deputy publisher of McKinsey Global Publishing and is based in the New York office.

Comments and opinions expressed by interviewees are their own and do not represent or reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of McKinsey & Company or have its endorsement.

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Hot Oceans Worsened Dubai’s Dramatic Flooding, Scientists Say

An international team of researchers found that heavy rains had intensified in the region, though they couldn’t say for sure how much climate change was responsible.

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By Raymond Zhong

Scenes of flood-ravaged neighborhoods in one of the planet’s driest regions stunned the world this month. Heavy rains in the United Arab Emirates and Oman submerged cars, clogged highways and killed at least 21 people. Flights out of Dubai’s airport, a major global hub, were severely disrupted.

The downpours weren’t a total surprise — forecasters had anticipated the storms several days earlier and issued warnings. But they were certainly unusual.

Here’s what to know.

Heavy rain there is rare, but not unheard-of.

On average, the Arabian Peninsula receives a scant few inches of rain a year, although scientists have found that a sizable chunk of that precipitation falls in infrequent but severe bursts, not as periodic showers. These rains often come during El Niño conditions like the ones the world is experiencing now.

U.A.E. officials said the 24-hour rain total on April 16 was the country’s largest since records there began in 1949 . And parts of the nation had already experienced an earlier round of thunderstorms in March.

Oman, with its coastline on the Arabian Sea, is also vulnerable to tropical cyclones. Past storms there have brought torrential rain, powerful winds and mudslides, causing extensive damage.

Global warming is projected to intensify downpours.

Stronger storms are a key consequence of human-caused global warming. As the atmosphere gets hotter, it can hold more moisture, which can eventually make its way down to the earth as rain or snow.

But that doesn’t mean rainfall patterns are changing in precisely the same way across every part of the globe.

In their latest assessment of climate research , scientists convened by the United Nations found there wasn’t enough data to have firm conclusions about rainfall trends in the Arabian Peninsula and how climate change was affecting them. The researchers said, however, that if global warming were to be allowed to continue worsening in the coming decades, extreme downpours in the region would quite likely become more intense and more frequent.

Hot oceans are a big factor.

An international team of scientists has made a first attempt at estimating the extent to which climate change may have contributed to April’s storms. The researchers didn’t manage to pin down the connection precisely, though in their analysis, they did highlight one known driver of heavy rain in the region: above-normal ocean temperatures.

Large parts of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have been hotter than usual recently, in part because of El Niño and other natural weather cycles, and in part because of human-induced warming .

When looking only at El Niño years, the scientists estimated that storm events as infrequent as this month’s delivered 10 percent to 40 percent more rain to the region than they would in a world that hadn’t been warmed by human activities. They cautioned, however, that these estimates were highly uncertain.

“Rainfall, in general, is getting more extreme,” said Mansour Almazroui, a climate scientist at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and one of the researchers who contributed to the analysis.

The analysis was conducted by scientists affiliated with World Weather Attribution, a research collaboration that studies extreme weather events shortly after they occur. Their findings about this month’s rains haven’t yet been peer reviewed, but are based on standardized methods .

The role of cloud seeding isn’t clear.

The U.A.E. has for decades worked to increase rainfall and boost water supplies by seeding clouds. Essentially, this involves shooting particles into clouds to encourage the moisture to gather into larger, heavier droplets, ones that are more likely to fall as rain or snow.

Cloud seeding and other rain-enhancement methods have been tried around the world, including in Australia, China, India, Israel, South Africa and the United States. Studies have found that these operations can, at best, affect precipitation modestly — enough to turn a downpour into a bigger downpour, but probably not a drizzle into a deluge.

Still, experts said pinning down how much seeding might have contributed to this month’s storms would require detailed study.

“In general, it is quite a challenge to assess the impact of seeding,” said Luca Delle Monache, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Dr. Delle Monache has been leading efforts to use artificial intelligence to improve the U.A.E.’s rain-enhancement program.

An official with the U.A.E.’s National Center of Meteorology, Omar Al Yazeedi, told news outlets that the agency didn’t conduct any seeding during the latest storms. His statements didn’t make clear, however, whether that was also true in the hours or days before.

Mr. Al Yazeedi didn’t respond to emailed questions from The New York Times, and Adel Kamal, a spokesman for the center, didn’t have further comment.

Cities in dry places just aren’t designed for floods.

Wherever it happens, flooding isn’t just a matter of how much rain comes down. It’s also about what happens to all that water once it’s on the ground — most critically, in the places people live.

Cities in arid regions often aren’t designed to drain very effectively. In these areas, paved surfaces block rain from seeping into the earth below, forcing it into drainage systems that can easily become overwhelmed.

One recent study of Sharjah , the capital of the third-largest emirate in the U.A.E., found that the city’s rapid growth over the past half-century had made it vulnerable to flooding at far lower levels of rain than before.

Omnia Al Desoukie contributed reporting.

Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times. More about Raymond Zhong

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Congo accuses Apple of using illegal conflict minerals in its supply chain

The Democratic Republic of Congo is accusing Apple of using illegally exploited minerals sourced in the eastern regions, involving violence, child labor and other human rights violations.

This allegation disagrees with Apple’s published Conflict Minerals Report , that states it found no connection between its smelters and refiner partners, and the armed groups of the DRC, as of December 31, 2023.

The company’s Conflict Minerals Report says it conducts ongoing due diligence and removed 14 smelters and refiners from its supply chain that were not willing to participate in appropriate audits.

The statement from DRC lawyers today, though, says that conflict mineral use in the Apple supply chain is ongoing and Apple’s products are thereby “tainted by the blood of the Congolese people”.

They say Apple’s reporting on mineral origin “does not appear to be based on concrete, verifiable evidence. Rwanda’s production of key 3T minerals is near zero, and yet big tech companies say their minerals are sourced in Rwanda”.

3T minerals include tin, tungsten and gold, which are essential raw materials for electronic components. Tin is used as solder for iPhone circuit boards, for instance. The trade of conflict materials is seen as a primary way DRC militia and terrorist groups finance themselves.

The DRC lawyers are petitioning Apple to respond to their questions within three weeks.

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Benjamin develops iOS apps professionally and covers Apple news and rumors for 9to5Mac. Listen to Benjamin, every week, on the Happy Hour podcast. Check out his personal blog . Message Benjamin over email or Twitter .

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