Enterprise Operational Resilience with Digitalization Approach amid the COVID-19 Era: An Empirical Assessment

Abstract

The development of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on one Chinese city that has depended heavily on tourism, which is the core focus of the current study. This article uses phenomenological research methods in qualitative research to conduct semistructured and in-depth interviews with travel agency managers in China Highlights. Through the application of tourism resilience theory in the tourism crisis management domain, this article investigates the performance of China Highlights, a local tourism enterprise in Guilin, China, to restore the functioning and growth of the tourism industry in the postpandemic period. The results show that China’s tourism industry is in the early stages of the fast growth stage of economic recovery, and tourism enterprises are faced with a significant challenge in determining how to make sound business choices during the pandemic and after the crisis has passed. It proposes that the tourism resilient theory can serve as a modern crisis management model to facilitate tourism enterprises to revive their performance in times of hardship.