As an important component of modern service industry, tourism is regarded as a “green” driver to regional economic growth and industrial upgrading. Applying the “quasi-natural experiment” advocated by the “The Belt and Road” initiative, this paper, based on the method of DID, assessed the influence of this initiative on regional tourism development by analyzing panel data collected from 286 prefecture-level cities in China over the period of 2007–2018. It is found that the “The Belt and Road” initiative has stimulated market dynamics and promoted tourism development in the regions along the route and has significantly improved indicators such as per capita domestic and inbound tourism revenue and per capita domestic and inbound tourist receipt. Also, the degree of contribution of domestic tourists to the tourism economy of the regions where the policy has been implemented is stronger than that of inbound tourists. In sum, the results of this paper not only confirm that the “The Belt and Road” initiative has significantly contributed to the high-quality tourism development of Chinese provinces along the routes but also provide important policy enlightenment for the upgrading of regional tourism industry and regional economic balance.

Motivating tourists’ responsible behaviors during their trip has emerged as an essential yet insufficient investigated topic in sustainable tourism research. Ration-based and socialization-based motivators have to be integrated to address the lack of a holistic antecedent framework of responsible tourism behavior. Thus, this study extended the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) into responsible tourism behavior learning and combined the theory of social influence to establish an extensive socialized model of UTAUT to explain tourists’ adoption of responsible behavior behaviors. This model includes three tourism elements—sustainable benefits, sustainable facility accessibility, social interaction engagement as antecedents, and two types of mediators: ration-based mediators of performance expectation and effort expectation and socialization-based mediators of informative influence and normative influence. 491 Chinese tourists were surveyed to confirm this model. It is found that all four mediators explain tourists’ responsible behaviors. Moreover, sustainable benefits positively influence tourists’ performance and effort expectation and social interaction engagement positively influences informative and normative influences, while sustainable facility accessibility positively leads to effort expectation and normative influence.