This paper aims to assess the impact of hard and soft measures on the competitiveness of tourism destinations. Additionally, this article examines the impact of tourism destination competitiveness on rural tourism sustainability management. Following that, knowledge sharing is used as a moderator variable to demonstrate its moderating effect on the relationship between tourism destination competitiveness and rural tourism sustainability. A total of 390 respondents, including both domestic and international tourists, who visited the six rural tourism destinations in Sarawak, Malaysia, voluntarily participated in this study. A PLS-SEM approach was used to evaluate the developed model, and WarpPLS software was used to perform the PLS estimate and hypotheses testing. The empirical findings indicated that destination appeal, tourism infrastructure, and service quality all have a significant and positive effect on the competitiveness of tourism destinations. Additionally, it was discovered that tourism destination competitiveness has a positive and significant effect on the sustainable management of rural tourism destinations.

Tourism is widely regarded as one of the largest and fastest growing industries on the world. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on international visitor arrivals and receipts for countries worldwide. Recognizing the need for tourism destinations to develop entirely new marketing strategies in the post-COVID-19 era, the establishment of travel brands for tourism destinations is critical to facilitating more effective marketing campaigns. As a result, social media marketing has been recognized as a viable marketing technique for promoting products, services, and information via social networking sites (SNSs). This is perhaps the first study to use the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model to examine how SMMA affect tourism destination marketing and, subsequently, revisit intention for rural tourism destinations in Sarawak, Malaysia. A total of 239 valid questionnaires were used to assess the fitness of the measurement (inner) and structural (outer) models. Interestingly, the empirical findings indicate that SMMA (i.e., entertainment, interaction, trendiness, customization, and word-of-mouth) all contribute significantly to the success of rural tourism destination marketing efforts. Additionally, it was discovered that a well-developed tourism destination marketing strategy is critical for increasing tourists' intention to revisit, particularly to rural tourism destinations in Sarawak.