A new PASS approach for tourism policymaking against COVID-19: learning from China’s experiences at early stages of the pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented and far-reaching impacts on the tourism industry worldwide. To fight against COVID-19 while maintaining economic development, China has adopted its unique policymaking system and made certain achievements in preventing the pandemic and promoting the recovery of domestic tourism, which may have reference values to other countries. By collecting the national-level tourism policies on COVID-19 in China and analyzing the connections between the keywords of these policies, this study conceptually proposes a new PASS (P: Pause-promote; A: Avoid-alternate; S: Supervise-stabilize; S: Support-sustain) approach for comprehensive and seamless policymaking for the public health crisis management in the tourism context. Even though the new PASS is derived based on China’s pandemic policymaking experiences, its general values are well supported by the practices in other countries. Policy recommendations from perspectives of key stakeholders are summarized. Policymaking challenges are finally discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• crisis management
• tourism
• policymaking methodology
• stakeholder perspectives

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Tingting Tian, Najuan Wen, Luyao Feng, Feifei Tian, Rui Zhang for text data collection from the Internet and Miao Gu for creating the figures for the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by National Science Foundation of China [grant number 72102131], Japan Science and Technology Agency [grant number JPMJJR2006], [grant number JPMJRX20J6] and the China Scholarship Council [grant number 202108050192].