An interview with Romira Young: opportunities and challenges for local small business owners in the tourism and hospitality industries in times of disaster

The purpose of this interview aims to offer a means to better understand tourism as it relates to small businesses within a global network.

A semi-structured interview was used.

The key findings are in line with Masco’s (2017) research that asserts “change can be selective and/or optional for the tourism stakeholders (e.g. tourists, operators, destination organizations, policymakers, local communities, employees), the nature and degree of crises-led transformations depend on whether and how these stakeholders are affected by, respond to, recover and reflect on crises”, particularly small minority-owned tourist companies.

This interview provides a lens to better understand how small businesses operate within the global market and remain at the cornerstone for sustaining domestic and international markets.

This study highlights small minority-owned business and their ability to become resilient. This interview illustrated that grounded small businesses, while implored with challenges from natural disasters, also have the resiliency to overcome such challenges when the agency has the ability to provide “turn-key” services for their clients thereby providing clients a sense of agency and value-laden experiences via personalization of services.