Turning crisis into chances: Tourism entrepreneurs’ timing strategies amidst emergencies

PURPOSE: Nowadays enterprises operate in a very turbulent environment characterized by frequent, significant, and often unpredictable changes. Such conditions, including crises, force enterprises to take quick actions to adapt to changing conditions. The aim of the paper is to identify chances and timing strategies used by tourism entrepreneurs in conditions of large-scale emergencies (such as COVID-19) and show how they can serve organizational resilience. METHODOLOGY: Qualitative research was conducted in the form of 12 individual in-depth interviews and 4 focus group interviews with 22 representatives of selected industries in the tourism sector. The concept of chance management and timing strategies is used to present how, according to our interviewees, changes in the environment caused by the pandemic contributed to the survival and development of their entities in the tourism market. FINDINGS: The research findings showed that changes caused by the pandemic allowed entities to identify several chances. These chances mainly concerned the introduction of changes to the offer (accelerating previously planned changes and enabling the introduction of unplanned changes). Moreover, they provided the chances to use held digital competences and time to think about the company’s development strategy, as well as establishing and developing relationships with stakeholders. Additionally, our research identified four timing strategies used by tourism entrepreneurs in the time of crisis, i.e. chance-grasping strategy, chance-entraining strategy, chance-riding strategy, and chance-creating strategy. IMPLICATIONS: Tourism enterprises are highly exposed to operating in crisis conditions. Therefore, chance management can be very useful in their activity and our research findings can be also useful regarding its theoretical and practical implications. From the theoretical point of view, we show how the concept of chance management (in particular timing strategies) can be useful for analyzing the reactions of tourism entrepreneurs to changes in times of crisis and taking advantage of opportunities arising from crisis situations. From a practical point of view, we show what strategies, depending on entrepreneurs’ subjective assessment of the current and future conditions for implementing changes, can serve organizational resilience in times of crisis. ORIGINALITY AND VALUE: This paper fills a research gap related to the use of the concepts of chance management and timing strategies from the perspective of tourist enterprises resilience, previously not used in this context and to a limited extent used in the general management literature so far.