Sustainable tourism and destination resilience in Nigeria’s tourism sector

Abstract

Resilience emerged in tourism research due to the need for destinations to withstand unforeseen circumstances, beyond the disruption of destination activities. Some destinations fail to withstand environmental turbulence due to inadequate resilience skills and strategies, which sometimes forces destination practitioners to retrench workers, thereby creating more unemployment. These lapses occurred because the destinations lack an injector that could improve their sustainable tourism performance. The above vacuum prompted this study. Thus, the main objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between sustainable tourism and destination resilience in southeastern Nigeria. The study used a cross-sectional survey design. Data were collected with a validated questionnaire from one hundred and eighty-four (184) participants at eight destinations in Enugu, south-eastern Nigeria. Three research hypotheses were developed from the literature review. The descriptive statistics were analysed in SPSS 25, while the research hypotheses were analysed using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4. The study found that sustainable tourism has a significant positive relationship with destination resilience.