Earthquake devastation and recovery in tourism: the Taiwan case

The most serious earthquake in Taiwan of the 20th century struck the central region of the island on September 21, 1999. The so-called September 21 Earthquake, measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, dealt a sharp blow to the Taiwanese tourism industry, with the worst impact being suffered by the international tourism sector. To revitalize the dramatic decline in inbound tourist flows, the government of Taiwan implemented a series of swift countermeasures. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether Taiwan tourism has rebounded completely from the crisis. This research establishes a model for Taiwan's inbound demand to predict the volume of visitor arrivals after the quake (September 1999 to July 2000). The forecasts are based on the seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model which are then compared with the actual volume of visitor arrivals to analyze the recovering status. Empirical results indicate that the island's inbound arrivals have not yet fully recovered from the earthquake's devastation after 11 months. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.