Hurricane Fiona hit the Turks and Caicos Islands as a Category 3 storm, after hitting the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where most people were left without electricity or running water.

Considering historical data on meteorology in the Caribbean, we see that the strength and intensity of extreme phenomena such as hurricanes has increased significantly in the entire Caribbean region in recent decades. This puts a strain on the resilience of the tourism industries throughout the region.  Just for example, the WTTC 2018 report on Caribbean Resilience and Recovery stated that the 2017 hurricane season resulted in an estimated loss of over 800,000 visitors and a loss of US$741 million for the tourism industry.

The topic of environmental sustainability and the contribution to slowing down climate change has been taken on by national governments, national tourism boards, regions, cities, multi-national companies as well as SMEs in the tourism sector. The Destination Management Organization (DMO) could play a critical and strategic role to make the tourism industry more resilient and able to fight against climate change. This is because the DMOs put together a variety of public and private stakeholders stimulating them to work together for common objectives. One of the most important characteristics of the DMO is related to its capacity to generate information flows between stakeholders that facilitate the decision-making process. In this sense, the DMO is able to acquire climate change knowledge and translate this knowledge into organizational learning and destination adaptation to extreme phenomena.

One of the most important objectives of the DMO in TCI will not only be those to promote the tourism industry in the main international market, develop and make more competitive the tourism offer in all islands, but also to transform each tourism destination in the country in a Learning Region in which the generation and exchange of information between all stakeholders will be extremely important to facilitate the implementation of programs and actions to make tourism enterprises in TCI more resilient to the climate change.