Assessing the COVID-19-exacerbated stigma of tourism development as perceived by destination residents

Responding to the normalised impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism development, we developed and tested a comprehensive model to investigate how the pandemic-exacerbated stigma of tourism is perceived by local destination residents and elicits their attitudinal proclivity towards local tourism recovery as mediated by felt relative deprivation. Meanwhile, collectivism was conceptualised as a moderating context in the framework, encapsulating the unique social fabric of China and its stifling "dynamic zero COVID" policy. Our study was conducted in Suzhou, which is a popular Chinese tourist destination in which large-scale compulsory antigen testing, lockdown, and quarantine measures were imposed on locals after three tourists contracted COVID-19 in November 2021. The structural equation modelling results indicate that relative deprivation mediated the positive relationship between perceptions of pandemic-exacerbated stigma of tourism and support for local tourism recovery. However, collectivism was found to have enhanced rather than attenuated both the direct and mediating effects of relative deprivation on support for local tourism recovery. Our study contributes to the literature by integrating the measurement of stigma perceptions into research on pandemic impacts on destination tourism development and expanding theoretical boundaries on resident responses to tourism in the time of COVID-19.