Conclusion: Tourist Behavior in the New Normal—Emerging Frontiers Toward Tourism Resilience

Over recent years, scholars have theorized about the possibility of a global pandemic that can affect the operations of the tourism industry globally. The overcrowding of cities, associated with a net of faster transport means, makes the virus transmission almost impossible to stop (Dombey, 2004; Novelli et al., 2018). Needless to say, not only global pandemic happened but also the COVID-19 pandemic introduced radical shifts in travel behavior as well as in migratory requirements (Korstanje & George, 2021; Kulshreshtha, 2021). The adoption of health passports or PCR tests reminded the changes in international flights and air commerce flights after 9/11. As stated in several parts of this book, COVID-19 placed the tourism industry as well as other service sectors to an unparalleled halt. In so doing, the tourism industry became the main carrier and victim of this virus (Gowreesunkar et al., 2021). Governments adopted restrictive measures to stop the virus outbreak which included the closure of borders, airspace, bus stations, and airports, or simply the imposition of lockdown that banned the free circulation of streets. Scholars in the academia debated adamantly to what extent this founding event signified a new opportunity for degrowth tourism and a more sustainable form of consumption (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020; Ratten, 2020) or a new challenge to tourism research (Liu et al., 2022). This begged the question of how we can study or educate students on tourism in a world without tourism (Zuccoli & Korstanje, 2023). The COVID-19 has implied positive and negative effects on operational issues, local development (Monterrubio, 2022), economies, social relations, and geopolitical tensions (Korstanje, 2022), without mentioning tourism higher education (Seo & Kim, 2021; Tiwari et al., 2021).