A study of the tourism industry's cash-driven resilience capabilities for responding to the COVID-19 shock

This study explores the tourism industry's cash-driven resilience capabilities. To map these capabilities, it enhances the existing analytical approaches to develop the two-dimensional evaluation of cash holdings of tourism businesses from four Central European Countries. The empirical investigation indicates that the non-resilient companies prevail over the resilient ones. If we consider the tourism industry sectors, cash-driven resilience capabilities differ statistically significantly at businesses size level but do not differ at the country level. It is observed that companies with greater cash-driven resilience capabilities are distinguished by a higher profitability and are less financially constrained. This study contributes to the ongoing debate on the COVID-19 impacts on the tourism industry by specifying the importance of financial slack and cash holdings in determining the resilience capabilities. In this respect, this study highlights the desired directions of system interventions and managerial concerns.