The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed tremendous impacts on the tourism industry worldwide. The tourism sector can take advantage of the new technology (e.g. virtual tourism), to respond to the challenges. This study aims to investigate factors influencing people’s acceptability in using virtual tourism during the pandemic in China and explore how virtual tourism can aid the recovery of tourism industry during and after the pandemic. We explore this through a mixed-methods approach. Our results show that the use of virtual tourism can be partially explained by the theory of planned behaviour. Virtual tourism has a strong influence on people’s on-site destination choices and can be used as an effective marketing tool to promote destinations and a platform to sell souvenirs and products. Virtual tourism can be an entertainment activity to bring immersed experience to people without being actually in the destinations, and thus reinforce stay-at-home order and help contain COVID-19. Even after the pandemic is over, people still show willingness to use virtual tourism for diverse purposes. The qualitative data also suggest virtual tourism can help promote sustainable tourism by reducing unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions from transportation and enhance ‘virtual accessibility’ especially for the elderly and disabled with limited mobility.

The soundscape is an essential type of attraction in tourism destinations. Music can serve as a significant tourist attraction that makes people immersed in it. Similarly, while tourists linger in the leisure and recreation environment, they may have a flow experience of the soundscape in tourism attractions. Yet, there is little research about the relationship between tourists’ perception of soundscape and flow experience. Taking Lijiang old town, a world heritage site, as an example, this study explored the dimensions of tourists’ perception of soundscape and soundscape flow experience and examined the influence of soundscape perception on soundscape flow experience. The results indicate that soundscape perception includes three dimensions: preference, comfort, and richness. The flow experience of soundscape is a second-order construct in this research, which contains four dimensions: time distortion, control, enjoyment, and concentration. Besides, preference and richness positively influence flow experience, and flow experience contributes to behavioural intention, whereas comfort does not significantly affect flow experience. This study applied flow theory to soundscape research, which enriches the study of soundscape experience. This study has also provided management strategies for tourism destinations to improve the quality of the soundscape experience.