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Introduction
The effects of COVID-19 and other crises and disasters on hospitality and tourism businesses have focused more attention on the concept of resilience than ever before (Bhaskara and Filimonau, 2021; Gössling et al., 2021; Karunarathne et al., 2021; Sagala et al., 2021). Although there is no single universally accepted definition of, or approach to, resilience, the concept has become rapidly adopted in the hospitality and tourism lexicon as a way of describing the capacity of different elements of the tourism system, be they industry subsector, destinations, communities, organisations, businesses or individuals, to respond to change (Cheer and Lew, 2017; Hall et al., 2004, 2018; Lew, 2014; Lew and Cheer, 2017; Prayag, 2018). Some of the appeal of resilience, apart from its growing usage throughout the behavioural and social sciences and in public and business policymaking (Adekola and Clelland, 2020; Joseph, 2018; Linkov and Trump, 2019), is that it is a future looking concept. In other words, by understanding how resilience and contingent concepts, such as vulnerability, function it may be possible to improve capacity to respond to future change. In other words, to “build back better” (Colmekcioglu et al., 2022).
The resilience concept has come to be regarded as essential for hospitality- and tourism-related businesses, organisations, consumers and communities to respond, adapt and survive exogenous and endogenous change (Hall et al., 2018; Pocinho et al., 2022). It has been argued that previous experience of crises and change potentially allows organisations to learn and respond accordingly to new challenges and crises (Prayag et al., 2018; Tanner et al., 2022). The ability of firms, destinations and individuals to demonstrate resilience has therefore come to be seen as a source of competitiveness (Lee et al., 2013; Hall et al., 2018). However, research is ambiguous concerning learning capacity and the ability to translate previous experiences to new and emerging crises (Bhaskara and Filimonau, 2021; Ghaderi et al., 2015). Uncertainties as to the value of resilience are only exacerbated by different uses and applications of the concept across disciplines. As Hassler and Kohler (2014, p. 119) observe, “the resilience concept is at times imprecise, contradictory and subject to negotiation”. The result is that there is confusion as...