Exploring the Factors of Rural Tourism Recovery in the Post-COVID-19 Era Based on the Grounded Theory: A Case Study of Tianxi Village in Hunan Province, China

Abstract

Effective recovery of rural tourism in the post-COVID-19 era could consolidate achievements in poverty alleviation and promote rural revitalization in China. In order to explore the factors influencing the rural tourism recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, this explorative–qualitative study chose Tianxi village in Hunan province of China as a typical case, as it has been officially selected as one of the key national villages for developing rural tourism. It was found that the process of rural tourism recovery in the post-COVID-19 era consists substantially of the development and evolutionary resilience in rural tourism. In the proposed theoretical model, the governance capability of local governments, robustness of rural social networks, activeness of rural talent, innovativeness of development mechanisms, and persistence of resilience cultivation are all essential factors throughout this process. Evolutionary resilience of rural tourism could enable destinations to manage unpredictable crises and even to seize novel development opportunities.

Post-COVID Tourism Recovery Strategy for Tourism Villages: Multi-Stakeholder Participatory Approaches

“…After the data has been obtained and collected, the next step is to import it into the NVivo 12 Plus tool to analyse through several analysis menus, such as sociograms, group queries, and mapping queries. Therefore, the resulting data will be described and discussed with some existing literature, crossing the discussion with the concepts built by Wang et al (2022) and Dwi et al (2021). The research objective has been successfully addressed, thereby making a valuable contribution to the extant literature as evidenced by the conclusions drawn.…”

“…The government plays an essential role in the resilience of the tourism industry, including village tourism (Wang et al, 2022). In this case, the Bantul local government is trying to bring regional tourism, including rural tourism, back to life.…”

“…To be highlighted, this article discussed how Wang et al (2022) stated that there are several essential factors to be addressed in the post-COVID tourism village recovery process, such as the development and evolutionary resilience of rural tourism, local and village governments capabilities, rural social network resilience, activeness talent, the development of rural innovation, and persistence in promoting village tourism. On the other hand, a multi-stakeholder approach from Dwi et al (2021) was also initiated in this study, where multi-stakeholders are reviewed through government, private, community, and community group actors, as well as the media.…”

Tourism Business Sustainability Analysis in the Post-Pandemic Era: A Systematic Literature Review

“…This has created a crisis in various fields, especially tourism, and leaves big questions about its sustainability in the post-pandemic period, both nature-based, culinary and other tourism. (Teczke et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022). So that a variety of strategies are needed, both those that can be implemented directly or for long-term thinking, which can also be a development of tourism itself.…”

“…pandemic, direct government intervention is needed to be able to maintain the sustainability of tourism(Abhari et al, 2022;Klinsrisuk & Pechdin, 2022). However, the solutions offered by researchers from China and Indonesia are slightly different because the assumptions of local residents as the main actors in tourism still hold post-pandemic optimism, so what needs to be developed more is innovation in order to maintain sustainability, either by increasing branding or updating the perspective of the local community (Pamungkas et al, 2021;Wang et al, 2022)…”