#Strongerthanwinston: Tourism and crisis communication through Facebook following tropical cyclones in Fiji

Because the tourism industry can be affected by various natural disasters, the media landscape with increasing social media, brings to tourism new possibilities and challenges in its preparing for, and handling, such disasters. The literature has paid little attention to social media's part in such phenomena. Therefore, this study explores how social media are used by hotels following Tropical Cyclone Winston in Fiji using mixed methods, based on interviews (n = 12) and hotels' real time Facebook posts (n = 1288). While we find that social media were underused in preparing for the disaster and response that followed, it played a crucial role in raising funds and donations during the recovery phase. We apply the social mediated disaster resilience (SMDR) model to allow this study to fill the knowledge gap in organizational disaster resilience literature. We show how social media are integrated in resilience-building and its potential for increasing hotel resilience.