In the past, developing a tourist destination seemed straightforward. What was needed was a few attractive assets, such as a beach, cultural sites or scenic mountains; investment in infrastructure; and easy and affordable access. The cost of energy was relatively stable – demand for tourism appeared ever-increasing.
The key task was to promote the destination to attract the visitors. For many destinations their climate was the attraction itself.
This stability made tourism a lucrative sector to invest in. Hotels were built against a known season, air links planned around reliable visitor flows, and insurers could price the next fire or flood by analysing those in the past. And travellers could book holidays with reasonable confidence about the weather awaiting them.
A geography of surprise
Extreme weather is now fundamentally changing this picture.
France experienced its hottest June this year, including the three hottest days ever recorded nationally. Less than two weeks later, another heatwave rolled through, just as the summer tourism season was set to ramp up. By July, extreme heat and drought were fuelling major wildfires across the country, including around the popular Arcachon Bay, where thousands of residents and holidaymakers were evacuated from homes and campsites.
Other recent examples of this mounting evidence include the 2024 wildfires in Jasper, Canada, which caused an estimated CAD 4.5 million in lost tourism revenue per day, and the 2023 wildfires on the US island of Maui, resulting in a USD 1 billion loss of tourism revenues.
In addition, there is a growing collection of real-world stories and examples of how extreme heat, floods and dangerous storms can disrupt tourism and the communities that depend upon it. Infrastructure damage, cancelled flights, evacuations and bleached reefs are capturing headlines in well-established destinations. In some places, these costs are starting to reach critical thresholds.
The damage from extreme events is the part we see, but there is a more profound shift underneath. Tourism is now moving from managing risk to dealing with uncertainty, and these two things present fundamentally different decision frames for policymakers, destinations and tourists.
Risk versus uncertainty
Risk can be measured across different datasets and timeframes. It used to be that with a long enough record, it was possible to estimate the probability of a storm, price an insurance policy, or plan flightpaths for acute risk avoidance.
But predicting future climate conditions is becoming more difficult as global trends and “average warming” values no longer translate predictably into local impacts. These complex and somewhat unexpected changes in climate parameters have been studied by climate scientists and visualised by NASA as a timelapse infographic.
What materialises in practice is a “geography of surprise”, where the range, intensity and duration of possible extreme weather events extend beyond previously observed patterns.
The Pacific Northwest heat dome in 2021, a one in thousand-year event, caused the death of over 1,400 people in Canada and the U.S. and a loss of over 1 billion marine animals. Tropical cyclones in Australia are increasingly tracking further south, placing popular tourist destinations on high alert and exposing those that are under-prepared. Unusually warm winters, such as Switzerland’s 20°C New Year period in 2023, are shattering records and forcing countries to adjust.
What does this mean for travellers and businesses?
Climate risk is becoming a significant driver of travel behaviour. Travellers are increasingly prioritising destinations and travel periods that offer safety, comfort, and ease of access, over specific destination preferences. As a result, demand for flexibility is rising, late bookings are becoming more common, and shoulder-season travel is becoming more attractive.
Against this backdrop, resilience becomes a competitive asset for businesses rather than an optional extra. The operator who can continue delivering a reliable visitor experience by adapting an itinerary overnight, or the resort that can withstand the impact of a cyclone and continue to function efficiently through a heatwave, will win the customers.
Building resilience will be more challenging for some businesses than others, and in an environment where insurance premiums continue to rise, it may also determine which businesses insurers are willing to cover.
Tourism operators are being forced to rethink long-standing business models, shifting from the traditional focus on optimisation (maximising occupancy and efficiency) to one of flexibility, redundancy and diversification.
Whistler ski resort in Canada, for example, has embedded climate adaptation into its tourism strategy by investing in wildfire preparedness, resilient infrastructure, and new year-round visitor experiences. While in the Maldives, a luxury resort operator has invested in solar-powered cooling systems, thermal energy storage and water security measures to ensure guest comfort even during extreme heat and energy supply disruptions.
Finally, destinations find themselves in a new type of competitiveness, one based around predictability. A destination that can still offer dependable conditions could gain share from one affected by disruption.
Destination climate reliability is becoming an economic asset in its own right, with the potential to redistribute resources and visitation patterns. “Coolcation” destinations, where travelers seek more temperate, higher-altitude and high-latitude destinations, and where temperatures remain more comfortable in peak summer months, are one such example.
Planning for the unplanned
In the future, adaptive planning, rapid recovery, and the capacity to operate under changing conditions will likely matter just as much as good weather or beautiful scenery ever did. The most significant impact of extreme weather on tourism may not come from any one event, but rather the slow erosion of predictability upon which modern tourism was built. In this environment, resilience will be an asset and uncertainty a cost.
This raises important challenges for policymakers. Climate change will not affect all places in the same way, meaning that global targets, such as limiting warming to 2°C, are insufficient for local tourism management.
Policies will need to be more place-based, forward-looking, and better able to deal with uncertainty. Alongside traditional approaches, governments will need to use innovative tools to help destinations prepare for a range of possible futures.
These will include:
- risk assessments
- scenario planning
- stress testing
- the development of adaptive pathways – where rather than committing to a single future, policymakers identify alternative adaptation pathways, establish trigger points for action, and maintain flexible funding and investment options that can be activated as conditions change.
While tourism remains a vital source of jobs, income, and development in many regions, the key capabilities for success are changing rapidly. The new normal requires destinations and businesses to be able to absorb shocks, adapt quickly, and offer confidence in a less predictable world.
Both policymaking and operational practices must elevate these capabilities as the sector shifts from simply managing risk to dealing with uncertainty.
Susanne Becken is a Professor of Sustainable Tourism at Griffith University in Australia where she focuses on research related to the science-policy-practice interface of transforming tourism. Susanne is a member of the Travalyst Independent Advisory Group, the EarthCheck Research Institute, the Te Araroa Trail Advisors in New Zealand.