Terrorism and Its Impact on Tourism with Special Focus on European Destinations

Abstract:

Terrorist attacks have a serious impact on nation’s prosperity. One of the sectors that is directly affected by the terrorist attacks is tourism industry. The purpose of this study is to explore one of the major risks of tourism - terrorism. It examines the effect of terrorism on European destinations especially in the past two years of 2015 and 2016 when Europe started to be hit by the Islamic State terrorist attacks. The methods include a literature review of available sources on the research topic found in the world’s acknowledged databases. In addition, the authors use the statistical data from several web pages. The results indicate that terrorism is not that high risk if compared with political instability or natural disaster. However, the findings also reveal that recent attacks in Western Europe have a significant impact on the outflow of international tourists and consequently, on the fall of country’s GDP.