The Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Global Tourism: A Geographical Study

The new Corona virus (covid-19) appeared at the end of 2019   in Wuhan, China, and it gradually spread in all countries of the world. Because it is an emerging virus, the World Health Organization announced that there is no specific treatment or vaccine and the organization’s instructions focused on setting travel restrictions and raised the slogan “Stay Home”. Perhaps what makes this crisis more dangerous for tourism is that the number of confirmed cases were recorded in Europe and North America, which are the most tourist sending and receiving continents. In fact, Europe is the top tourist destination in the world.
Then, global tourism faced an unprecedented grinding crisis, the first of its kind, due to the (Covid-19) pandemic. The World Tourism Organization described the crisis as unprecedented and that the tourism and aviation sectors are the two most affected sectors by the crisis. According to the expectations of the World Tourism Organization, the number of tourists in the world may decrease between 20% and 30% in 2020, and global tourism income will decrease by about a third. In other words, the global tourism sector will lose from 250 to 400 billion US dollars due to this crisis. However, the losses that occurred exceeded expectations, as we will show later.
This research monitors and studies the effects of the Covid-19 virus on global tourism in terms of the volume of tourism, tourism revenues, the aviation sector, hotels, employment, and other economic impacts on the countries of the world in light of this global pandemic. It also sheds light on the future of global tourism and the expected scenarios and procedures for recovery from the effects of this crisis.