We comparatively examined tourist mobility changes in the entire country and explicitly covered two distinct waves of COVID-19 outbreaks, based on mobile phone data from 277.15 million tourists from 2019 to 2021 in China. The results show that domestic tourism in Beijing was even higher after the pandemic than prior to it. In addition, we found that female and elderly groups had a slower recovery after the first wave, whereas this was the opposite one year later, after the second wave. Additionally, wealthier, larger cities were notably hit the hardest. Overall, our findings provide a better understanding of tourism management in public health crises and policy-making during post-pandemic recovery and for future outbreaks.
Keywords: Big data; China; Human travel behavior; The COVID-19 pandemic; Tourist mobility.
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