The Epistemology of Tourism Security

Abstract

The act of traveling needs higher levels of trust in view of the fact that the traveler is unfamiliar with the visited topography. The “sacred law” of hospitality not only reduces the anxieties in hosts and guests but also gives a veil of trust in order for the risk to be controlled. It is unfortunate that terrorism affects notably the organic image of the tourist destination. After hard work, policymakers see how their work of years evaporates in seconds. For this reason, scholars are captivated to present an all-encompassing model to understand risks and its impacts on the tourism industry. Somehow, theorist of risk perception enthusiastically embraced quantitative methodologies in detriment of qualitative ones. The authors review all conceptual and methodological limitations of the risk perception literature and lay the foundations to a new (more) qualitative definition of risk. This chapter explores the issue from a qualitative viewpoint introducing ethnography as a valuable instrument of research.