Tourists’ perceptions of various risks at their travel destinations have crucial implications for destination management organizations and other tourism industry practitioners, which is growing into an unprecedented concern in the post-pandemic era. The Internet has boosted the global homestay industry. The perceived risk of homestay tourists requires further attention from researchers to promote the sustainable development of the homestay industry, especially in the post-pandemic era. To supplement and enrich the literature, this study aims to explore the relationships between tourists’ perceived risk, three dimensions of tourists’ emotional solidarity with hosts (feeling welcome, sympathetic understanding, and emotional closeness), and their customer loyalty towards the homestay industry in the post-pandemic era by taking the homestay industry of Guangzhou, China as the context, and employing SmartPLS for the empirical analysis. The results indicate that perceived risk has a significantly negative impact on emotional solidarity and customer loyalty, while emotional solidarity has a significantly positive impact on customer loyalty and plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between perceived risk and customer loyalty. The theoretical contributions of the article and the practical implications of the findings for the sustainable development of the homestay industry are discussed.

The expansion of the homestay industry is shadowed by ethical concerns and perceived risks. In this context, the emotional relationship between hosts and tourists in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic needs to be re-examined. Focusing on the togetherness of “we” rather than the demarcation of “you versus me,” we integrate homestay hosts and guests into a conceptual model to examine and compare their emotional solidarity with each other, as well as the relevance of emotional solidarity to perceived risk, MES (Multidimensional Ethics Scale), and support for homestays. Our results show that despite the assumption of perceived risk, tourists feel welcomed by hosts during the pandemic, while hosts feel emotionally close to tourists. In addition to the findings that emotional solidarity mediates perceived risk, MES, and support for homestays in both samples, we find that hosts’ perceived risk is more likely to influence their emotional solidarity and support for homestays.

With improvements in the public awareness regarding volunteer opportunities, more people are participating in social work, particularly during emergency events. The mental health of volunteers has been attracting more academic attention due to its increasing social significance. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, a qualitative interview was conducted to identify important attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control factors guiding people’s volunteering behaviors in an emergency context. Then, a sequential quantitative survey was implemented based on the results of the qualitative study to explore the impact of the aforementioned factors and job involvement on eudemonic well-being. The moderating role of empathy in these relationships was also investigated in this nested design. The results indicate that behavioral attitudes, perceived control, and job involvement have significant positive effects on volunteers’ eudemonic well-being. A high perspective taking (cognitive empathy) of volunteers positively moderates the relationship between job involvement and eudemonic well-being, while high personal distress (affective empathy) buffers this relationship. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to emergency volunteer activities.