Effect of Covid-19 on the Tourism Industry: Opportunities and Threats in Covid-19 Era

Covid-19 pandemic has been spread rapidly world-wide during the last two years. Apart from the negative results in the health department - 290.959.019 confirmed cases and 5.446.753 deaths as at 4 January 2022 (WHO, 2022) - coronavirus pandemic creates a global negative impact on trade and economic world, causing problems, including unemployment and poverty. Unfortunately, one of the major economical markets that was heavily "injured" is the Tourism Industry. More than 100.8 million of people, working in the hospitality industry, have lost their jobs in the last two years (Statista, 2021), whereas a lot of businesses (such as hotels, restaurants, cafe-bars and airlines) are close to bankrupt. The aim of the current paper is to study the relationship between Covid-19 and its effect on the tourism sector. The methodology which will be used is literature selection of papers, studies, articles, journals retrieved from online bibliographic databases (such as Science Direct and Google Scholar). Finally, although there is a serious number of threats due to the decrease on the tourist industry, there are a lot of opportunities which could come up (for the tourism sector) after Covid-19 era. Both of them will be investigated in the current paper.