Revitalizing Domestic Tourism Amid the Pandemic: An Assessment of Tourism Economic Resilience in Japan and Thailand’s Stimulus Campaigns

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented shock to the global tourism industry, including those in Japan and Thailand. In response, both the Japanese and Thai governments decided to launch large-scale domestic tourism stimulus campaigns – Go To Travel and We Travel Together, respectively – as mechanisms to support resilience. This article employs a documentary analysis of tourism agency data, government reports, academic articles, and news media. Adopting Norris et al.’s conceptual framework of resilience, the paper assesses tourism economic resilience provided by these campaigns based on three criteria: robustness, redundancy, and rapidity. In terms of robustness, both campaigns demonstrated strong financing and substantial returns for the overall tourism industry. Regarding redundancy, the campaigns were complementary and could be substituted by other similar programs such as Go To Eat and Let’s Go Halves. Lastly, the fact that both governments launched the campaigns only six months after confirming their first COVID-19 cases underscores their rapidity. Despite certain challenges, these campaigns contributed to the tourism sector’s resilience, as highlighted by their robustness, redundancy, and rapidity, and ultimately helped revitalize the tourism industry in both countries during the crisis.