Asia’s Tourism and Hotel Leaders Face Huge Weather Test
Right, Dr. Guy Llewellyn, EHL Hospitality Business School. Above, photo by Abid Shah on Unsplash
08 Sept 2026
A possibly historic El Niño is expected to peak between October and December. Who among Asia’s leaders will be ahead of the deluge? Find out in this article written for Hotels-Asia by Dr. Guy Llewellyn, EHL Hospitality Business School’s academic director-APAC and assistant professor
UN Tourism estimated 1.52 billion international arrivals in 2025, a 4% increase over 2024, with South-east Asia capturing a large share of that demand. But the region’s growth is outpacing a more consequential kind of readiness: the ability to withstand earthquakes, typhoons and floods that are becoming fixtures of the travel calendar.
Among the safety challenges facing South-east Asia’s tourism industry, extreme weather and disaster resilience may be the most underestimated. Unlike intermittent and unpredictable tourism crises, extreme weather events are recurrent, seasonal and increasingly forecastable. They arrive each season on an increasing scale, testing the same systems, agencies and hotels year after year, often exposing unresolved vulnerabilities. How a destination performs during these weather events is what will separate the tourism leaders of the next decade from everyone else.
Reactive by design
When a magnitude 7.7 earthquake centered on Myanmar sent tremors through Bangkok in March 2025, direct damage to hotels was minimal. But images of a collapsed high-rise spread globally within hours, and the response exposed how thin Thailand’s crisis communication was. More than 1,100 hotel bookings were canceled within days; Songkran reservations fell sharply, and analysts projected a loss of 200,000 to 700,000 foreign visitors, depending on how quickly confidence recovered. While Thai authorities and industry stakeholders worked to reassure travelers, the episode exposed the difficulty of delivering coordinated, real-time messaging across multiple channels during a rapidly evolving crisis.
Typhoon Yagi told a similar story a few months earlier. When it tore through northern Vietnam in September 2024, more than 20 tourist boats sank in Halong Bay, closing four airports and and canceling hundreds of flights. Vietnam’s disaster response was capable, but it was reactive by design, built to manage an event already underway rather than blunting one that was approaching.
What anticipatory action looks like
While no disaster management system is perfect, the Philippines has moved further than most regional peers toward institutionalizing anticipatory action. In September 2025, it became the first country to pass a State of Imminent Disaster law, authorizing national and local resources to act before a storm makes landfall rather than after. Two months later, twin typhoons Tino and Uwan struck within weeks of each other; more than 1.5 million people were evacuated ahead of landfall using the country’s PhilAWARE early-warning platform, and forecast-based financing released emergency funds up to 72 hours before impact. Studies show that such anticipatory action reduces disaster losses by roughly 3.5 times compared with the reactive approach in most of the region.
The contrast is clearer when viewed alongside neighboring systems. Vietnam illustrates the scale of losses when repeated hazards meet limited anticipatory capacity. Between September and November 2025 alone, with low insurance coverage throughout, it absorbed billions of dollars in losses created by five separate typhoons, Ragasa, Bualoi, Matmo, Kalmaegi and Fung-Wong. That gap, not the storms themselves, is the real competitive divide across South-east Asia.
South-east Asia remains badly underinsured against these disasters. Since 2000, only about 12% of the region’s economic losses from floods and tropical cyclones are covered by insurance. Asia-Pacific absorbed roughly US$145 billion in natural catastrophe losses in 2025 alone, with less than half insured. Regional mechanisms such as the South-east Asia Disaster Risk Insurance Facility are starting to close that gap for governments, and Laos alone has drawn down payouts within days of a triggering event rather than waiting months for aid.
The bill is due either way
Thailand’s overall 2025 numbers show how quickly multiple disruptions can compound when traveler confidence weakens. International arrivals fell to 32.9 million, down 7.2% from 2024, the country’s first annual decline outside the pandemic in more than a decade, with earthquake, flooding and border tensions all compounding one another. A single well-handled shock rarely moves the numbers this much. A pattern of poorly anticipated ones does.
The next bill is already being drafted. Forecasters at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society say a strong, possibly historic, El Niño is developing through the second half of 2026 and is expected to peak between October and December.
For South-east Asia, that typically reshuffles the hazards rather than pausing them: drought, heat, wildfire and haze risk tend to rise across Indonesia and the Philippines; monsoon onset is delayed; and typhoon tracks shift northward toward Japan and Korea rather than disappearing from the region altogether. The systems described above are about to be tested again, against a different hazard and on a shorter clock than the one that just passed.
What this actually requires
None of this calls for more safety brochures. It calls for hospitality leaders to treat weather resilience as operational infrastructure rather than disaster relief. That shift costs: anticipatory systems require trained staff, institutional authority and the political will to spend money and order evacuations before a disaster is confirmed, which is exactly why most destinations still wait. But the Philippines has shown that the investment pays off.
Travelers increasingly evaluate destinations through the lens of disruption risk. When airports remain operational, hotels communicate clearly, recovery occurs quickly, resilience becomes a competitive advantage rather than merely a protective measure. In an era of climate uncertainty, reliability itself becomes part of the destination brand.
Hotels and destination marketing organizations need pre-built, real-time communication protocols that activate when a hazard is forecast, not after cancellations start. Owners should be pushing insurers and asset managers toward parametric catastrophe products, which pay out on a measured trigger such as wind speed or rainfall, rather than after a lengthy claims process. And destination authorities should adopt the same anticipatory posture as the Philippines, including pre-positioned resources, cross-agency evacuation plans, and forecast-based funding that releases before landfall rather than after the damage report.
South-east Asia’s tourism boom is real and is not going away. As the typhoon season returns every year, destinations that treat resilience as core infrastructure, not an afterthought, are the ones that will keep standing when the next storm hits. The rest will keep explaining themselves after the fact.
ABOUT THE EXPERT
Dr. Guy Llewellyn joined EHL in 2021 as an assistant professor at the Singapore campus. Before joining EHL, he spent over a decade in the hospitality industry, holding senior roles including general manager, club manager and executive chef. He holds a PhD in Philosophy in Hotel and Tourism Management from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where his thesis focused on utilizing neural networks for independent restaurant site selection.
His research interests include the role of technology in the hospitality industry, restaurant location decisions, and linguistics in menu design. Dr. Guy’s academic expertise extends to areas such as hospitality operations, strategic management and decision-making processes within the hospitality sector.