الفهرس 
Chapter 1: IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
As vital as it is, tourism is considered as a highly vulnerable industry with so much complexities and interdependencies among its sectors which makes it more prone to crises of all types than other industries. The Egyptian tourism industry has also been suffering greatly; despite the important role tourism plays in the Egyptian economy, it has been suffering tremendously for the past decade due to a series of critical incidents such as political misfortunes, major airline disasters, terrorist attacks, bombings and other crises that made it very difficult to tourism businesses to perform appropriately.
In spite of the various reform endeavours taken by the Egyptian formal tourism authorities, the Egyptian tourism industry –based on the views of the research participants- has been lacking the ability to prepare for such crises. Therefore, crisis preparedness was the starting point for this scientific investigation as the main question was: What are the major determinants of crisis preparedness in the Egyptian tourism industry? The objective of this question was to develop a theoretical framework of the main prerequisites that define the level of preparedness of the Egyptian tourism industry in order to capture the unique features of the research context, advance the understanding of the concept of crisis preparedness in tourism industry, and add to the existing body of knowledge related to tourism crisis management.
To achieve those objectives, a three-phase exploratory-sequential design was adopted to first explore qualitatively and then develop an instrument (a survey) that was later quantitatively tested. The first phase of the study was a qualitative exploration of the major crisis-preparedness prerequisites in which data were collected from executives and business owners registered in the Egyptian Tourism Federation that is divided into five main sectors: hotels, travel agencies, tourist establishments, tourist commodities, and diving and water sports through the use of semi-structured individual in-depth interviews. from this initial exploration, the qualitative findings were used to design a survey research through the use of a questionnaire that was
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administered to a larger, statistically-based sample of participants to assess the validity of the developed theoretical framework.
The first phase of this investigation resulted in a theoretical model that comprised three groups of crisis-preparedness determinants; state, sector, and organization-level. Each group consisted of a number of factors that –from the standpoint of the research participants- define how much each of those three entities is equipped to face potential crises. Sequential to that phase was the interim phase in which a measuring instrument was set (a survey) that was based on the developed theoretical model in order to be used later in the third and last phase of this investigation.
The last phase of this study was designed to answer another research question: To what extent are the determinants of crisis preparedness representative of and generalizable to the larger population of Egyptian tourism executives? The purpose was to test the validity of the theoretical model. Therefore, Structural Equation Modelling was used to turn the theoretical model into a measurement model through confirmatory factor analysis. The product of this last phase was a three-level measurement model with a number of factors that existed in the theoretical model omitted due to their statistically-unacceptable loadings.
The final model produced in this scientific investigation could be useful to those working in the tourism industry as it could help them assess their crisis-preparedness competencies. Therefore, the outcome of the study could be considered as a diagnostic tool for crisis preparedness.