The impact of COVID-19 on tourism in Cracow in the eyes of tourism entrepreneurs

The purpose of the study was to collect opinions of Krakow’s tourism entrepreneurs about the impact of the pandemic on their activities and their expectations concerning tools of marketing communication that could facilitate recovery. The respondents were asked to assess the drop in sales of tourism services, their opinions concerning the prospect of a tourist traffic recovery, possible measures that could facilitate the recovery and what they expected the local government to do in this respect. In recent years Kraków has become one of Poland’s most recognisable destinations, benefiting from increasing revenues generated by a systematically growing number of visitors. This growth has even prompted concerns about overtourism in Kraków. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected the entire supply chain in the tourism industry, leaving the city empty of tourists and causing a financial breakdown for many companies. In order to diagnose the scale of the crisis triggered by the pandemic, the authors conducted a CAWI survey of Kraków based tourism entrepreneurs in the middle of March. The development of the epidemic and steps taken to protect the tourism sector from mid-March to the end of June 2020 were used to validate views formulated by the respondent. The results of the survey reveal the level of economic losses anticipated by tourism entrepreneurs and their predicted occurrence over time, opinions about the likely sequence in which particular tourism products in Kraków are going to recover, as well as expectations concerning the tools of marketing communication that could facilitate the recovery.