Sustainability refers to the evaluation and communication of quantitative and qualitative information of the sustainability performance of a business in a balanced way regarding the environment and the society in which it operates. Companies are responsible for stakeholders’ justification and disclosure expenses consisting of dedicated sustainability practices, thereby strengthening the company’s financial performance. However, due to the deficiency of consistent information and a lack of transparency in corporate reporting, tourism industries fail to realize the association between sustainability practices and financial performance. Moreover, there is a lack of literature that deals with the impact of macro-level sustainability factors on firms’ financial performances. Furthermore, linking the going concern concept and sustainable practices with financial performance through the Z-score model is not frequently done in the corporate world. Hence, this paper investigated the impact of macro-level sustainability practices on the going concern ability in developed and developing countries’ tourism industries for the 2016–2020 period, including a sample size of 138 listed companies, through panel data analysis. This study fills the empirical gap by adopting the Altman Z-score to analyze the financial performance related to sustainability practices in terms of environmental, economic, and social dimensions. The empirical results reveal that macro-level sustainability practices significantly impact the going concern from developed and developing countries’ perspectives.

Currently, most countries in the world endure financial distress due to the ongoing economic crisis. Thus, financial distress prediction (FDP) has become vital in speculating the business continuity for the corporate world. In the context of Sri Lanka, the travel and tourism industry has been highly exposed to political, economic and climate (weather) shocks, as well as being sensitive to the impacts of COVID-19. Along with those shakes the recent economic crisis and the need for FDP led the researchers to empirically investigate the discrimination zones, i.e., distress zone, grey zone, and safe zone of the travel and tourism industry in developed and developing countries. This study adopted Altman’s (1968) original Z-score model for data analysis. This research is based on secondary data from annual reports of 138 listed travel and tourism companies listed on the stock exchanges of developed and developing countries: the USA, Australia, Singapore, South Africa, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka during the five-years period (2016–2020). The purposive sampling method is used to obtain the secondary data for the study. The finding revealed that 96.38% of travel and tourism companies are in the distress zone, 2.90% grey zone, and 0.72% safe zone in developed and developing countries. This study recommends all the travel and tourism companies in developed and developing countries maintain enough retained earnings to avoid corporate failure. This study is significant since it evidences the FDP and signals the global economic depression.