Abstract
Introduction
The massive revenue streams generated by inbound tourism came to a crashing halt when the COVID-19 pandemic began its onslaught on global travel in early 2020. The financial shock was arguably most severe in Southeast Asia (Bentzen and Tung, 2024; Shin et al., 2022), a region with a disproportionate amount of their economic viability dependent on tourism (Table 1; Beh and Lin, 2022; Chon, 2000; Dolezal et al., 2020). International tourists were prohibited from entering all countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional bloc, resulting in dramatic drops in international tourism numbers (130 million in 2019 to less than 3 million in 2021, see Dolezal et al., 2020: 3) and losses to their respective Gross Domestic Products (GDP) in 2020, 2021, and 2022, the latter year when all nations in the area re-opened their borders to tourists from overseas. A chart outlining the plunge in international visitors and revenue for nine of the eleven ASEAN nations illustrates the extent of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on their respective bottom lines (see Table 2). In fact during COVID-19 the tourism economies of ASEAN countries fared worse relative to other nations: according to the World Travel and Tourism Council in 2020 “international tourism arrivals and actual air reservations into the region (Southeast Asia) had decreased by 98% compared to a 83% global reduction” (Canadian Trade and Investment Facility for Development (CTIF), 2021: 61).
Economic indicators of the tourism sector in selected ASEAN countries (2019).
Source: Calderwood and Soshkin (2019), Uppink and Soshkin (2022), Asian Development Bank (2022).
Economic impact of Covid-19 (2019-2021).
Though there is no doubt that tourism in Southeast Asia and around the world was fundamentally altered during the COVID-19 pandemic, what is frequently forgotten is that the global tourism “reset” did not mean travel and leisure ceased (Allan et al., 2022; Nunkoo et al., 2022). During the pandemic years national governments worldwide encouraged those living within their national borders to travel domestically, especially during times when the virus was held at bay and/or vaccine uptake was determined to be satisfactory enough to prevent a public health disaster (Moya Calderón et al., 2022). China, for example, responded to the pandemic and associated de-globalization measures worldwide by triggering a “dual circulation model” that established a two-pronged outward-looking (international) and inward-looking (domestic) economic pathway with domestic tourism a centerpiece of its internal growth approach (Lo, 2020; Yu, 2024). Though ASEAN did not create and implement such a clear-cut economic recovery policy their recalibration toward domestic travel provided a necessary economic lifeline during a period of severe financial instability.
Any purported tourism “reset” during the COVID-19 pandemic must necessarily incorporate the demand for travel despite ongoing, unpredictable, and in many cases severe restrictions to mobility. This paper traces how governments in Southeast Asia responded to and facilitated travel demand by prioritizing programs that aimed to inject interest in their domestic tourism industries. The governments of Southeast Asia threw resources behind a mix of promotional campaigns, incentive programs, and safety initiatives supporting their respective domestic markets. In this paper we examine three leading strategies that made up a core part of ASEAN’s tourism repertoire during the longest stretch of border controls from March 2020 until the middle of 2022. They are (1) building national community, (2) strengthening sustainability, and (3) creating a safe travel experience.
This paper draws on nine national studies conducted by local, in-country researchers from (in alphabetical order) Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam to form a comprehensive picture of the promotional dynamics of ASEAN’s domestic tourism industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 Centering our research on governmental promotional and marketing responses in the Southeast Asian tourism industry during COVID-19 is critical to understanding how a key region in the global tourism economy worked to maintain tourism’s heartbeat in the midst of uncertainty and fear surrounding one of the most consequential restrictions on mobility and spending in history, pushing the region into unprecedented “limbo” with respect to its international arrivals and tourism industry-based livelihoods (Adams et al., 2021) and forcing it to reckon with what Mostafenezhad calls an “unnatural disaster” in the tourism industry (Mostafanezhad, 2020). Another facet of this research sheds light on an underexamined domestic market in Asia that is not China or India, highlighting the unique interests of Southeast Asia’s own touring citizens as compared to international guests (Singh, 2009). Our paper is also a way to better assess the Southeast Asian leisure economy for which domestic tourism is central rather than secondary to visits from international guests (Nunkoo et al., 2022). Lastly, our findings show that tourism continued to be of critical importance to ASEAN governments and they supported finding a way for people to continue to travel during the extended COVID-19 “lockdown” period.
The next section of this article establishes a conceptual framework at the intersection of ASEAN tourism and the COVID-19 pandemic. The subsequent section describes our project background and methodology, which brings leading tourism researchers throughout Southeast Asia into dialog with a project leadership team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Following these sections the paper then moves on to show how Southeast Asia “looked inward” to cultivate domestic tourism during COVID: by building national community, strengthening sustainability, and creating a safe travel experience. The conclusion reflects on our study by critically evaluating the extent to which the shift toward the domestic market forced on a pandemic-stricken Southeast Asian tourism industry will have any long-term effects on their marketing approaches going forward. In the final section we also comment on the conceptual value of an inward facing Southeast Asia, a region often associated with “outward looking” mobility and transnationalism that became abruptly isolated through the COVID-19 pandemic era.
Recentering domestic tourism in Southeast Asia
The pre-pandemic years of tourism in ASEAN countries were ones of unbridled growth, with the sector in full money-making bloom. Bui and Dolezal (2020)place the story of Southeast Asia’s tourism transformation around 40 years ago, when governments began creating “neoliberal,” or open, unregulated, competitive markets: “Since the 1980s, the Southeast Asian region has achieved and sustained a remarkable rate of growth, and incomes increased well above the developing country average, with tourism being one of the most important sectors in ASEAN economies” (p. 26). In 2019, the year before COVID-19 engulfed the world, Southeast Asia’s inbound tourist records were shattered. As mentioned above, 130 million visitors entered Southeast Asia from overseas in 2019. To cite two prominent examples from that year, 19 million people visited Singapore (Singapore Tourism Board, 2020) and almost 40 million traveled to Thailand (National Statistical Office of Thailand, 2020). The region is known for relying on tourism business as a core part of its economic health; in 2019 tourism contributed to over 25% of Cambodia’s GDP and 11.7% to Malaysia’s (Table 1).
Yet academic and industry focus on international tourist visits to the region has long concealed Southeast Asia’s domestic tourism dynamics. Even before the pandemic domestic tourism numbers in several ASEAN countries dwarfed international tourism figures with revenue proportioned similarly. With the exception of Singapore, a city-state that does not record domestic tourism, in Southeast Asia there is no shortage of interest in travel no matter how prohibitive the circumstances: it is a region with rapidly growing if uneven per capita income figures (Rigg, 2016), a young population (
Outside of the healthcare sector the apocalyptic narratives accompanying the arrival of the novel COVID-19 virus in early 2020 were arguably most pronounced in the global tourism industry. From the perspective of the tourism studies canon, in the early years of the pandemic tourism researchers conducted rapid assessments of the impact of COVID-19 on tourism in Southeast Asian national (Do et al., 2022; Foo et al., 2021; Quang et al., 2022), regional (Ong and Frohlick, 2023), and global contexts (Hall et al., 2020; Lew et al., 2020), with many arguing that the industry would or should be irrevocably diminished as a result of the virus (Jacobsen et al., 2023). Regional studies of the virus’s effects on Southeast Asia concentrated on how it would exacerbate inequality and limit inclusive growth and sustainability (see Shin et al., 2022). Others suggested that the long tail of the virus provided an opportunity for tourism research in Asia-Pacific to lead academic conversations about a world under “new normal” conditions by drawing on core tourism tenets like sustainability, resilience, and regeneration to better protect and conserve the environment (Becken and Loehr, 2023). On the economic growth side the internal component of China’s “dual circulation model” focused on import-duty benefits to domestic Chinese travelers as a way of bolstering local economies like Hainan in the southeastern coast of the country (Lo, 2020). In sum a great deal of research on the tourism industry have been undertaken and published since the onset of the pandemic with the majority of it documenting the variegated impacts of the virus on the tourism industry (Kaczmarek et al., 2021; Villacé-Molinero et al., 2021; Yang and Smith, 2023), its livelihoods (Adams et al., 2021), the physical environment (Spalding et al., 2021), and individual tourist sites (Yang et al., 2021). There have been many city- and country-wide studies of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism in Southeast Asia but to date a comprehensive study of the trends and patterns of a leading regional economy destabilized by the virus has not been undertaken.
Conceptual debates in tourism studies have not kept pace with the prominence of the region in the tourism industry, but this gap in theorizing from Southeast Asia is slowly being corrected (Chang, 2021a, 2021b; Cho, 2023; Conran, 2011; Del Casino and Hanna, 2000; Sin et al., 2015; Winter et al., 2008). The “critical” turn in tourism studies has encouraged important shifts to the core tenets of tourism studies and ushered in overdue conversations about authorship, voice, and goal-setting in academic theory-making. Sin, et al.′s provocation about tourism in the Asian Century includes an explanation of “critical tourism” resonant with our own efforts in this paper when they state that: “Critical tourism scholarship is characterized in part by a commitment to fundamentally question hegemonic knowledge making practices” (Sin et al., 2021: 653). Including a diversity of voices and experiences from the Global South (or the majority world) in knowledge production is one way to begin efforts to problematize knowledge production about tourism coming from the Global North, which has been criticized for maintaining a neocolonial “bird’s-eye view” perspective on Southeast Asia that reproduces orientalist fantasies (Said, 1978; Winter et al., 2008, though see Yan and Santos, 2009); glossing over or mischaracterizing a richness of economic, social, and political complexities (Oakes, 2009, 2021); and defaulting to imaginary notions of “Western” democracy, market economies, and freedom of press and movement as being the only goals Asian societies “should” have (Neher and Marlay, 1995). There is also a prevailing sense that Western-centered research about the Southeast Asian tourism economy concentrates on international inbound travel at the expense of the much larger actual or potential domestic market.
As such the deconstruction of the “Self-Other” binary has long been foundational to decolonial studies and critiques of modernity (Said, 1978). After years of nascent attention (see Winter, 2007), more intellectual space has recently been created by tourism studies scholars to tear down destructive stereotypes of an exoticized Asia made prominent through “Self-Other” tourism narratives and practices (Chang, 2021a, 2021b, though see Liu, 2025) by exploring intra-Asian tourism (Gao et al., 2022), Southeast Asian domestic tourism (Dolezal et al., 2020), and Asian tourist activities in the West (Bui and Trupp, 2020). Strides have been taken by tourism researchers based in Asia to establish new conceptualizations of core tourism ideas such as authenticity that also upend binaries like Self-Other (Rickly, 2022; Wang, 1999). Taken as a whole and as discussed in the conclusion the Southeast Asian region is deserving of a reset that foregrounds its coherence and resilience by way of the region’s tourism industry.
The combination of the conceptual and empirical based research outlined above is collectively a means of reimagining the global tourism landscape for which Asian people (broadly defined) are producer-consumers rather than host-sellers. This is the case for our research as well, where Southeast Asian domestic tourists are given newfound space and attention to travel around their homelands. Indeed, we take inspiration from Dolezal and Trupp’s call for more emphasis on domestic tourism in Southeast Asia when they write: “Fostering domestic and cross-border tourism in Southeast Asia is one of the strategies to increase the local benefits from tourism, particularly when taking into consideration the increasing spending power of some Southeast Asian economies. Domestic tourism not only stimulates local economies through increased tax revenue but also avoids the use of long-haul flights, ultimately enabling tourism to follow principles of sustainability” (Dolezal and Trupp, 2015: 119).
Methods
Early 2021 saw foreign policy officers of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) reach out to academics at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, to sound out capacity for our team to undertake a funded project on the effects of the COVID-19 virus on the Southeast Asian tourism industry. By that time the virus had firmly and powerfully embedded in the lives of the world’s inhabitants and though a vaccine was in rapid development it was not expected to be available for some time. In other words from the perspective of MFAT there did not seem to be any diplomatic travel possible for the foreseeable future. With these restrictions to travel in place MFAT found itself with additional sums and they chose to spend some of it on independent academic research that could be utilized to better understand domestic tourism interests in New Zealand by way of the ASEAN experience.
Our project is entitled “Covid-19 and the Tourism Sector in Selected ASEAN Countries: Impact, Response and the Road to Recovery” and budget was initially allocated for work in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam. Resources were extended in 2022 to include four additional country investigations and round out the region (Brunei, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore). 2 MFAT and the research team developed three objectives: first, to better understand the extent of the damage on tourism in Southeast Asia in 2020–2021; second, to evaluate the Southeast Asia tourism industry’s coping strategies vis-à-vis the pandemic; and third, to document the longer-term pathways developed by national governments and corporate bodies to recalibrate tourism given the unpredictable and potentially lasting effects of the virus on the industry.
The policies restricting movement and human interaction created the conditions for our research methods. As a general rule of thumb ASEAN’s domestic tourism window was exclusively open from the middle of 2020 until early 2022 and our collective analysis occurs within this time period. Due to the pandemic the Southeast Asia-based researchers did not conduct any interviews or organize focus groups with officials, those working in the tourism sector, or industry players. Instead, secondary data related to official, government-sponsored programs surrounding domestic tourism amidst the pandemic were gathered and examined: for example, official government correspondence and policies, media reports and statements from national tourism organizations, and digital marketing initiatives, including from social media channels. Tourism-related materials were collected in both English and the first language of each respective country covered, with evidence in the host nation’s language translated in to English by each in-country researcher.
Born out of these materials the in-country scholars were asked undertake content analysis and write thorough policy reports with prompts to ensure compatibility across the region. The regional cross-cutting prompts are: assessing the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism industry; mitigative responses to the pandemic vis-à-vis the tourism industry; adaptive measures taken to ensure a sustainable and resilient tourism sector; and conclusions and policy recommendations. These prompts reflected the dominant issues facing each ASEAN government’s tourism industry during the pandemic. As companion pieces short policy briefs summarizing the full reports were also drafted. At the request of MFAT policy briefs includes key messages about the respective nations, case study exemplars, and policy recommendations. The full policy reports and policy briefs are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bb0zVpKHGlJx3OeStZ1XQJWmOomaSnq9, accessed 29 October 2025.
While the project was to emphasize broad brush analysis of each country’s conditions and future plans, in-country researchers were also asked to sketch 2–3 local case studies to provide additional local context. These are well-trodden tourist sites in their home nations that more closely assess the impacts, mitigative responses, and adaptive measures taken in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research group felt that by zeroing in on individual sites the validity and reliability of our cross-regional findings would be clarified and enhanced. Each selected case study is a well-known international tourism destination or business namely, Abode Resort and Spa and the Empire Hotel, Brunei; Siem Reap and Sihanoukville, Cambodia; Bali, and Yogyakarta, Indonesia; Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang, Laos; Penang and Manukan Island, Malaysia; Palawan and La Union, the Philippines; Singapore Airlines and Sentosa, Singapore; Chiang Mai and Phuket, Thailand; Hue and Phu Quoc, Vietnam. Regular virtual meetings among the research team in 2021 and 2022 included reviewing the reliability of the secondary data, parameters around the prompts, and selection of leading tourism sites. To our knowledge this is the only comprehensive research conducted on COVID-19′s impact on the ASEAN domestic tourism industry, and only one of a handful about the ASEAN tourism industry at all (see Koh and Kwok, 2018).
Building national community
At the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns ASEAN citizens were prohibited from traveling overseas and outbound international commercial flights ceased (Fang et al., 2021). The story in Southeast Asia is a familiar one globally: nations locked down their borders, forbidding all but citizens from entering and restricting overseas travel; schools and businesses were closed, with learning and work continuing online; construction projects were paused; flights were grounded; and society largely came to a standstill. As the months wore on and virus transmission was kept at bay, many of the national governments in Southeast Asia began to slowly ease restrictions to mobility. Strong uptake of the various COVID-19 vaccines throughout Southeast Asia brought fresh attention from ASEAN governments to their domestic tourism industries (Shin et al., 2022).
The challenges to tourism driven by the COVID-19 virus could be turned around and viewed through the lens of domestic tourism as an opportunity to reinforce and even strengthen national communities. Table 3 identifies the major domestic tourism campaigns in ASEAN countries between 2020 and 2022 (Table 3). These narratives, we argue, are as much about rescripting nation-states through a mix of emotional attachment and shared national experience sketched through national collective responses to COVID-19 as they are about financially incentivizing people to travel. Campaigns put ownership over the direction of each nation’s tourism industry in the hands of its citizen base. Reconnecting with their backyards, forging new discoveries and relationships in recognizable locations, and embedding domestic tourism into imagined national communities are themes featured in each campaign.
Major COVID-19 domestic tourism campaigns in ASEAN 2020-2022.
The campaigns of Thailand and the Philippines perhaps most convincingly demonstrate the effort to establish an emotional attachment to nation through domestic tourism endeavors. In Thailand the “Rao Thiao Duai Kan (We Travel Together)” promotion—initiated early in the pandemic in June 2020—connects the journey through the COVID-19 disruption with a call for Thai people to unite through domestic travel. In this campaign leisure travel is an explicit part of the collective nature of Thai identity during periods of unrest (Dalferro, 2022). Two requirements for travel in the “We Travel Together” initiative are that Thais must have a smartphone to link up to the campaign’s offerings, and they are required to travel to a province different than the one they are registered as living in (Bangkok Post, 2020; Saxon et al., 2021). The digital component ensures the Thai government can track emergent travel patterns (thereby better understanding where Thai people most want to visit during crisis times) while inter-provincial travel enables a broader, interconnected Thai national imaginary.
The Philippines campaign, “‘Balikan Ang Pilipinas’ (Come Back to the Philippines),” plays on the emotional attachment to the nation for the high percentage of Filipinos employed overseas (Liao, 2020). Its core message is that in times of crisis it is essential to return to the Philippines to contribute to the various elements of national identity—family, friends, and national community. The campaign also suggests that in times of emergency (like the COVID-19 era) the extensive Filipino diaspora should gather together within the Philippines. Traveling domestically is an extension of this emotional affection to people and place.
In the Department of Tourism’s promotional video supporting “Balikan Ang Pilipinas” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlXHHF0IfQY, accessed 6 October 2025) sweeping rural vistas are interspersed with images of people laboring in agriculture. The overriding sentiment in the 2-minute video is that Filipinos believe social distancing measures—a core part of domestic tourism in the midst of a pandemic—are easier to abide by in the countryside. Nevertheless, there is a strong emphasis on keeping people safe in the form of clips highlighting diligent contact tracing, testing, and masking (more on the safety dimension appears later in the paper). This particular promotion creates a rural Philippines that is at the heart of domestic tourism. The theme of work cementing the Filipino national community appears throughout the video as well: snippets of hard-working farmers, fishers and artisans remind “balikbayans” (overseas Filipinos returning home) of the centrality of work in the life of Filipinos no matter where they reside. A work-focused shared national experience also relates to the conscientiousness of all Filipinos in combatting the spread of the virus.
The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly transformed places primarily for the foreign market into barren sites open for domestic tourism consumption. An absence of international visitors encouraged Southeast Asian governments to remind citizens of valuable spots at home, thereby arguably putting ownership of these sites into locals’ hands. The Empire Hotel and Country Club in Brunei is a good example of how this phenomenon surfaced. A five-star resort largely catering to global upper classes who do business in the country, the hotel was flung into a sustained period of vacancy during the pandemic. While initially being used as one of Brunei’s quarantine hotels, 4 the Empire subsequently offered promotional packages to Bruneians that made the hotel an attainable getaway for them. Domestic travelers stayed over long weekends or during public holidays for a fraction of 2019′s market rate. Over 40 other hospitality venues signed up for the “Selera Bruneiku” (A Taste of My Brunei) campaign to offer similar “unique to Brunei” experiences for locals (Azney, 2020).
Welcoming local tourists to famous locales during the pandemic was also a strategy for Singapore (the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, Saini, 2020), Malaysia (the Shangri-La Kuala Lumpur, Nathan, 2020), Vietnam (the Metropole Hanoi, Laubichler-Pichler, 2021), among other countries and destinations. The governments of these nations leveraged on the emotional attachment of domestic tourists to their country’s national landmarks and fed them into promotional narratives that highlighted their respective successes in combatting the virus. Perhaps minimized during “normal” tourism times that prioritize international tourism, domestic tourists were given new life and notice through Southeast Asia’s community-led local tourism initiatives.
Strengthening sustainability
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the drumbeat from many corners of tourism studies was to use the slowdown to begin thinking about “doing tourism differently” (Becken and Loehr, 2023; Jacobsen et al., 2023; Lew et al., 2020; Tseng et al., 2023; Yang et al., 2021). A reconsideration of the environment was the chief mandate during the tourism “reset” period brought on by the pandemic (Crossley, 2020; Higgins-Desbiolles, 2021; Niewiadomski, 2020). With the benefit of hindsight we now see the spuriousness of these claims 5 but in pandemic times there were real concerns among ASEAN member-states that international tourism would cease to exist in the volume and forms that it previously had. Projects were therefore developed to adjust to this “new normal” through the incongruent mix of domestic tourism diversification and environmental protection, or what we call in this section “strengthening sustainability.”
Sustainability for Southeast Asian governments means both better approaches to environmental sustainability and more thoughtfulness toward domestic tourism-sustained revenue generation. Contrasts inherent to the twin tasks are stark: anyone who lives or has spent time in Southeast Asia is aware of the vast environmental destruction brought on by tourism growth (e.g. Kerber and Kramm, 2021) and the pandemic was thought to provide a welcome opportunity to re-center tourism values on protection and conservation rather than environmentally damaging profit motivations (Cheer, 2020). Yet minimizing the industrial growth side of tourism in favor of caring for the environment and biodiversity is anathema to the millions of livelihoods reliant on the massive tourism sector in Southeast Asia (Adams et al., 2021), to say nothing of the corporate power instilled in the Southeast Asia tourism sector.
Responsiveness to local businesses affected by the drop in international tourism was one facet of the ASEAN member-states that virtually all governments participated in. Measures arrived on the supply side of tourism business in the form of business and employee subsidies, tax breaks, fee exemptions, rent forgiveness, restructuring debt, free and/or subsidized skills training, waiving utility bills, and the like. Despite these efforts, thousands of tourism and tourism-related businesses closed during the pandemic, many permanently. Millions lost their jobs and their livelihoods. Our research determined that all nine of the ASEAN countries provided some form of financial support for formal and informal employees in the tourism industry during the pandemic.
However, it was also equally imperative for Southeast Asia governments to inject the demand side with financial support in order to encourage domestic tourists to spend their money “buying local.” The most popular of these region-wide were hospitality vouchers. Five of the nine countries in our study—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—used government resources to provide vouchers which could only be used in hotels, restaurants, or for cultural activities. Thailand, for example, allocated a budget of USD154.1 million dollars (5 billion Thai baht) to subsidize 40% of domestic tourism travel expenses, while Malaysia unveiled special income tax relief of up to ~USD215 (1000 Malaysian ringgit) per individual to support domestic tourism costs. 6
Another original idea aimed at supporting the beleaguered Southeast Asian tourism industry was to initiate “flights to nowhere” where domestic tourists could purchase an air ticket and set off on a short flight around the surroundings of the airport. Returning to the same airport where they departed, these trips was environmentally destructive but nevertheless extremely popular with domestic tourists in Brunei flying with Royal Brunei Airlines (Mzezewa, 2020). Similar outings were proposed in Singapore by way of Singapore Airlines (SQ) before public outcry at the environmental consequences forced the airline to pivot to converting their airplanes into entertainment centers offering dining and entertainment while parked at the airport and never going airborne (Hosie, 2020). Thai Airways launched a campaign for domestic tourists translated as “Fly to Receive Auspiciousness in the Sky” where domestic tourists could fly over 99 sacred Thai sites in 31 provinces over a span of 3 hours, landing back in Bangkok upon completion of the trip (BBC News, 2020). Travel vouchers and creative uses of state-owned airplanes demonstrate the importance of sustaining tourism revenue streams through domestic tourism offerings during the long and uncertain days of the COVID-19 era.
Invoking environmental sustainability for domestic tourists in ASEAN countries has been less of a concern than efforts undertaken to maintain profits through domestic tourism. It is fair to say that the lockdown encouraged financial sustainability over rethinking best environmental practices in the Southeast Asian regional tourism industry, a preference shared by China when it launched its “dual circulation model” at the beginning of the pandemic period in 2020. However, there were a few experiments that targeted conservation through more environmentally conscious domestic travel. In 2021 the Philippines started a “Green Corridor Initiative” designed to cultivate popular domestic tourism circuits outside of large cities. 7 Largely a promotional exercise lauding the natural beauty of the Philippines, the campaign also encouraged domestic tourists to travel overland and short distances to protect the environment (Adobo Magazine, 2021).
Though not explicitly a domestic tourism product, many ASEAN countries used the pandemic to set new policies and regulations to support their national parks and temples. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand all began charging and/or raising the entry fees for destinations like Komodo Island and Sabah Parks. This included raising ticket prices for domestic visitors, which caused backlash (Jibiki and Damayanti, 2022). Reports of the recuperation of several endangered species endemic to Southeast Asia due to the lockdown were promising, though other accounts in our study noted that in places like Indonesia native monkeys (macaques) began to starve without tourists present to feed them (Daniels, 2020). Moreover, government funding earmarked for conservation projects was diverted to urgent COVID-19 protection needs, thereby reducing necessary resources for some vulnerable natural areas in Southeast Asia.
In sum, the goals of Southeast Asian nations to establish a sustainable tourism industry in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic emphasized domestic tourism diversification through creative marketing campaigns. “Sustainability” with respect to the environment featured less prominently, though there were a few promising developments mentioned briefly above. One unequivocal element of the domestic tourism push in Southeast Asia during COVID-19, however, was establishing strict public health mandates to create a safe travel experience.
Creating a safe travel experience
The central tension emerging in Southeast Asia during the long tail of the pandemic was how to attend to the recovery of their respective national economies while maintaining a protective stance toward the public health of the region. In no other industry was this challenge more acute than in the tourism industry, where human mobility and interaction are two of the most essential components (Becken and Loehr, 2023; Chu et al., 2022). Like many governments around the world ASEAN states responded to the spread of COVID-19 by requiring citizens to stay in place; closing virtually all establishments (businesses, parks, restaurants, and places of worship); and ordering any travel to cease until the virus was brought under control.
In this section we summarize the most common techniques used by ASEAN nations to protect their domestic tourist travelers from contracting the COVID-19 virus. This section moves beyond investigating measures aimed at the general population (e.g. quarantining upon arriving in country, quarantining at home, masking up, testing, distribution of vaccines, contact/quick response (QR) tracing, social distancing, protective equipment use, increased hygiene, cashless payments, proof of vaccination, strong border security), and investigates tourist-friendly safety schemes developed to facilitate domestic tourism.
The most popular initiative among the nine countries in our study is the move to domestic ecotourism outings. Building from earlier arguments, ASEAN countries featured the beauty and relative emptiness of their rural areas in selling a safe leisure experience to domestic tourists. With financial assistance from their governments Bruneian, Filipino, Indonesian, Lao, Malaysian, and Thai tour companies sold outdoor tours, river cruises, trips to waterfalls, camping trips, and farm package visits, among other opportunities. 8 Due to its city-state status, Singapore did not produce dedicated ecotourism packages while the Vietnam and Cambodia reports did not specifically mention domestic tourist-focused ecotourism tours.
One of the biggest ecotourism initiatives came as a part of the “Lao Thiao Lao” (Lao Visit Lao) campaign when Luang Prabang launched a “555 Luang Prabang” domestic tourism scheme that encouraged outdoor enthusiasts to visit five mountains, five hills, and five rivers in the area. 9 Malaysia inaugurated ecotourism in its 12th Malaysia Plan (2021–2025) which was meant as a refresh of the tourism sector during the pandemic. In the plan national parks such as Kilim Geoforest Park in Langkawi, Royal Belum State Park in Perak, Danum Valley in Sabah, and Mulu National Park in Sarawak were all mentioned for their attractiveness to domestic tourists (The Sun, 2021). Another facet of the newly instituted conservation fees and higher entrance fees was that they were implemented across many of the ASEAN countries to convey how seriously nations took the safety and security of their local visitors, with masks and personal protective equipment regularly distributed to travelers as a part of their trips. Beautification improvements for parks and public spaces also incentivized domestic tourist visits, as did restrictions on the number of tourists who were able to enter national park and public space facilities (Board, 2020; Martinus, 2023).
Building trust also became an important part of the evolving relationship between governments and domestic tourists during lockdown and travel restrictions. Once each ASEAN government determined the virus was contained, domestic tourism endeavors were underpinned by discourses and practices linked to tourism’s “new normal”: careful devotion to implementing travel experiences that would not result in illness or outbreaks. This frequently meant rapidly laying out certification programs for hotels, resorts, restaurants, and public spaces. Penang, Malaysia, launched a “Responsible Tourism” campaign to educate local tourism providers about their responsibilities to make the city a reliable and secure destination for Malaysian citizens (Ng, 2021). This campaign worked alongside the “COVID-19 Safety Accreditation Programme,” which is a quality assurance initiative aimed at tourist sites such as hotels, theme parks and shopping centers to ensure they meet the strict safety and health guidelines spelled out by Penang authorities (Ng, 2021).
In December 2020, the Indonesian government’s Ministry of Tourism and the Creative Economy codified domestic tourist safety when it created the Cleanliness, Health, Safety, and Environment (CHSE) protocols. Committing 70 billion rupiah (~$4.8 million USD) to the cause, the CHSE plan focused on creating a set of certification standards to be used at hotel, restaurant, resort, and attraction destinations. In both the Malaysia and Indonesia cases only fully vaccinated domestic tourists were permitted to travel to accredited and certified places, meaning that trust during COVID was intended to be a reciprocal process between virus-minded domestic tourists and their national governments.
Among ASEAN countries the surge toward the use of digital platforms was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. ASEAN’s pivot to digital offerings had the additional benefit of tracking tourists, therefore providing a platform to better understand various market segment behavior. In October 2020, Vietnam launched a “Vietnam Safe Travel” smart phone application to inform Vietnamese travelers where safe and unsafe destinations were located throughout the country. In 2021 it then added a health declaration to the platform (Vietnam National Authority of Tourism (VNAT), 2021). The Hotel Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMA) in the Philippines organized several online booking sales for the various hotels and resorts across the country featuring discounted offers for domestic tourists. Investing in regular room and public space sanitization, hospital-grade sterilizers, and disinfectant foggers was a core part of persuading tourists that businesses were holding up their end of the trust and safety bargain with vaccinated travelers (Business Mirror, 2020). By 2021 the Singapore Tourism Board had created an E-Visitor Authentication system that reduced physical touchpoints and simplified the check-in process for 30 of its most popular hotels (Singapore Tourism Board, 2021). Trialing this technology with domestic tourists was seen as a testbed for integrating it into the entire Singapore hospitality industry in the future (Singapore Tourism Board, 2021).
Conclusions
This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of ASEAN’s swing toward domestic tourism during the Covid-19 pandemic years of 2020–2022. The COVID-19 pandemic was a global tragedy that had uneven effects throughout the world. Research has proven that in its entirety ASEAN nations fared better in battling the virus than others (Shin et al., 2022). This paper’s analysis extends from the “success story” of ASEAN’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic to more deeply investigate how success against the virus shaped domestic tourism opportunities in an era when overseas guests were prohibited from visiting the region.
Relatedly, the research has also advocated for an ASEAN region where domestic tourism is central rather than peripheral to the behemoth regional tourism industry. Southeast Asia is renowned for its tourism offerings and the nations in ASEAN rely on tourism for a large percentage of their gross domestic product, employment opportunities, small to medium enterprise business sector, and status in the global economy. A silent but implicit assumption in the tourism industry, among tourism studies academics, and from tourists themselves is that tourism in the region is for international rather than domestic guests. The paper’s evidence demonstrates that this is not the case; indeed, it was domestic tourism that kept the tourism economy afloat through COVID-19. Our research highlights the supply side of ASEAN’s push to get its citizens moving throughout their respective countries by summarizing the marketing and promotional side of domestic tourism facilitated by ASEAN policy makers. Said succinctly, domestic tourism was used by ASEAN member nations as a tool to fight the adverse impacts of the virus.
Thinking conceptually about a region that receives little attention in the critical tourism studies literature but quite a bit in the Asian studies realm (e.g. Pepinsky, 2015; Thompson, 2009; Winichakul, 2014) the article encourages framing Southeast Asia as agentive producer in rather than passive beneficiary of the global economy (also see Chang, 2021a, 2021b). Cohering Southeast Asia around domestic tourism production reconfigures the conceptual side of the region in three ways. First, the cross-regional emphasis on domestic tourism illustrates the resilience of the Southeast Asian economy, one that is often misunderstood to be subject to the fluctuating whims of mobile global capital and tourists. Of course the nations of ASEAN were financially wobbled by the pandemic but it did not fall to its knees for a prolonged period of time like the region did during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and its aftermath. The domestic tourism economy’s strength is a reason why.
Secondly tourism infrastructure played a significant role in maintaining mobility and connectivity during the pandemic. The widespread investment in infrastructure across ASEAN countries over the past few decades—often misinterpreted as solely being for international tourism purposes—means that numerous Southeast Asian nations have arguably leapfrogged the sagging infrastructure in the Global North and become impressive, even pathbreaking vis-à-vis the rest of the world (see Hirsh, 2016). The article argues for the formidability of Southeast Asia’s growing infrastructural power and by extension, its intra-regional mobility and connectivity.
Lastly, despite its title “looking inward” was a promotional strategy utilized by Southeast Asian governments at one challenging moment in its history and should not be misconstrued as the region’s permanent orientation. A pertinent question to thus ask is: Is ASEAN’s focus on the domestic tourism marketplace an ephemeral phenomenon or can it be a blueprint, like China, for future crises? Our answer is that it is both. The power of the domestic tourism marketplace has made visible a neglected community and alerted governments and providers alike of its power in the region. There is little question that domestic tourism provided a necessary safety net during a period of sustained crisis and will likely do so in the future. That recognition is an important one for a tourism marketplace like Southeast Asia’s that increasingly resembles China’s dual circulation model: “the domestic economy is the dominant factor under the dual circulation strategy. . .the Chinese authorities seek to comprehensively promote domestic consumption and create further room for domestic investment. In essence, the new strategy aims to develop a self-reliant domestic economy supplemented by international trade” (Yu, 2024: 684). In arguing for the enduring primacy of the domestic tourism economy this paper is not as concerned as McKenzie, Shin, and Oh, who issued a warning about the future of the ASEAN in the aftermath of the pandemic when they argued, “(t)he tremendous economic impact of COVID-19 in the region. . . .was expected to have a lasting detrimental impact on inclusive growth” (McKenzie et al., 2022: 4).
On the other hand, the allure of international visitors continues to pervade the marketing and promotional investments in ASEAN. At the time of writing (late 2025) the push for international visitors is arguably even more intensive now that borders have been fully open for about 3 years and competition between regional players is stiff. Knowing how vibrant the domestic tourism economy is what seems likely to occur is an optimization of both the international and domestic tourist segments throughout Southeast Asia, at least until the region is faced with another pandemic or associated health risk such as the H5N1 outbreak that affected the region in the early 2000s. At that point the lessons learned about how to keep the economy moving through domestic tourism initiatives, as showcased in this article, will be of worth to ASEAN governments.
Footnotes
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