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While the COVID-19 pandemic evolves and new variants emerge, destinations and cities look to tourism recovery, cautiously rebooting and re-opening borders. Since the start of the pandemic, dramatic lockdowns have been employed, resulting in dire economic and social consequences to the tourism and hospitality industry and creating the need for a more feasible and sustainable response in the post-pandemic era. Pandemic vigilance and resilience at the societal level have become key in pandemic preparedness. However, due to the complexity of managing COVID-19, no clear cross-disciplinary collaborative framework for tourism recovery has been developed. Cross-sector collaboration to collectively integrate resources, capabilities, and experiences should be prioritised to spearhead tourism recovery plans. With insight on public health, pandemic preparedness, and community access, we hypothesised that cross-industry collaboration between the tourism industry and the pharmacist profession is relevant to the measures adopted for recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. To examine this hypothesis, this study aimed to explore perceptions from key stakeholders in the tourism and the pharmacist sectors on cross-industry collaboration towards COVID-19 management and the “know-how” in developing, adopting, and advancing such a partnership. This exploratory study adopts and advances the ‘Four Cs’ conceptual framework of communication, cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. In terms of our hypothesis, interview responses with tourism executives and CPs confirm the framework’s suitability and the importance of an interdisciplinary collaborative approach between CPs and the tourism sector to craft a sustainable pathway to recovery from COVID-19 and future pandemic measures as borders re-open and international mobility increases. A tourism recovery strategy from this pandemic can occur more judiciously through a collaborative partnership with an extensive network of pharmacists within communities and popular tourism sites, as CPs have valuable healthcare resources and the ability to track and communicate healthcare alerts to tourism destination recovery efforts.

By 2006, Macao became the global leader in casino tourism, surpassing the Las Vegas Strip in terms of gross gaming revenue primarily driven by Macao being the only place in China where casino gambling is legal. Conspicuous within Macao’s casino marketing strategy has been the investment in celebrity endorsement to lure Chinese visitors to Macao. China has also emerged as one of the world’s largest and increasingly sought-after high-yield travel markets. As competition intensifies for the emerging Chinese travel market globally, understanding the most optimum communication strategy that can be effectively applied to and influence Chinese outbound travelers can give greater direction to destination marketing agencies and National Tourism Authorities. With a focus on the influence of the celebrity endorsement tactic on travel perceptions and decision making, a face-to-face survey was conducted on 305 Chinese visitors to Macao in 2013. The study revealed that perceptions and destination decision making differed among Chinese visitors with regard to age, gender, education, and income range, when using the celebrity endorsement tactic. The findings showed that celebrity endorsement could be used more strategically to influence and target certain Chinese traveler segments, emphasizing the need to carefully assess the usefulness of such a costly tactic within destination promotional campaigns aimed at the Chinese audience.

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