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Resilience and crisis management studies in tourism emerged as a common research umbrella during the pandemic. They have predominantly focused on destinations and their management and marketing. As a result, a vast body of knowledge discusses and provides various frameworks for destination crisis management and resilience (Kuscer et al., 2021; Lachhab et al., 2022). However, research related to the role of tourism small and medium businesses (hereinafter tourism SMEs) in the context of crisis management and especially building resilience is underrepresented and urgently needed. Actually the'health'of destinations regarding their preparedness to manage crises successfully and building longterm resilience, should only be possible be tanginbly be measured in the strength and stability of their SME ecosystem and its sustainable business model innovation capacity.

In this paper, we explored Ljubljana tourism SMEs plans through the pandemic: when the covid-19 first hit, the actions undertaken through the first lockdown and strategies to overcome the subsequent ones, once it became clear this was not a short-term emergency. At the same time, we explored lessons learned about their business and themselves throughout the pandemic and how they used innovation to adjust their business models in order to build resilience. A total of 19 interviews with SMEs and destination authorities in Ljubljana, Slovenia in the period of September 2021 to April 2022 informed the study.