THE TOURISM CRISES: CAN TUNISIA RECOVER AFTER JASMINE REVOLUTION?

Tourism is considered as a vital sector having a lot of gains such as development in income, employment, foreign exchange, additional in growth. The United Nations world tourism organization had vision related with forecasting with annual tourism expenditure to shock US$ 2 trillion and the number of foreign tourists to reach 1.5 billion by 2020The tourism industry is one of the most important industries in the world since it employs “more than 250 million people worldwide” (Coshall, J. T. (2003)). This industry, which includes transport, lodging, and catering, is expected to generate $12,119 billion of revenues and 279,346,000 jobs in 2018 (The Economist, 2011, January 20). The tourism industry worldwide is also expected to indirectly and directly contributes 10.9% to Gross Domestic Product [3]. However, the tourism industry is an extremely sensitive and vulnerable activity, which can be impacted significantly by important events such as terrorism, political insecurity, and natural disasters (Coshall, J. T. (2003)). This is exactly what happened to Tunisia, a small country located in North Africa, which is a “strategically irrelevant country” with no oil or natural resources (Mihailovich, D., & Sommer, N. (2011). However, Tunisia functions thanks to tourism, which is crucial to the economy. Consequently, in order to boost the economy of Tunisia, the government and tourism authorities should examine the impact of the Jasmine Revolution on the tourism industry in order to determine how the industry in Tunisia can recover from the revolution. The purpose of this study is to develop recommendations on how the tourism industry in Tunisia can recover from the Jasmine Revolution after which it has experienced a severe decline of 40% in the number of visitors compared to the previous year (Reuters 2011, February 4). The recovery of Tunisia's economy depends heavily on how the government and tourism authorities will manage the tourism crisis. So, what is the impact of an event such as the Jasmine Revolution on a country, which functions essentially thanks to tourism? How have other countries managed tourism crises and to what extent did they succeed? Finally, what