COVID-19 Impact and Recovery on Tourism in Africa: An Introduction and Background

This chapter provides the context in which the book ‘COVID-19 Impact on Tourism Performance in Africa’, is written, including highlights in the rest of the book. The COVID-19 pandemic came amid global trends toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which were dealt a major blow as all attention globally shifted toward reducing the devastating effect on all sectors of the economy including global tourism. Global tourism including Africa was heavily impacted by the lack of mobility and sociability which are the key success factors to tourism flourishment. Global lockdowns inhibited tourism in many aspects including reduced hotel occupancy or zero occupancy in some instances, no passenger travel, and no local travel affecting both international and local tourism and resulting in a detrimental effect on the performance of the tourism sector both strategic financial and non-financial objectives, Mission, and Vision. Governments globally and in Africa attempted to employ different means including economic stimulus packages to thwart the devastation like deaths and zero movement while tourism enterprises employed different means to comply with government regulations. African tourism organizations and enterprises employed various strategies to rejuvenate both local and international tourism as lockdown restrictions eased until the present post-COVID-19 situation.