This study sought to conduct a socio-economic impact assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic on informal business tourism in Zimbabwe. The specific objective of this study was to identify the extent to which the informal business tourism economy in Zimbabwe has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and to prescribe guidelines and frameworks of workable actions to address the problems. As such, the study adopted a desktop research approach in which a thematic analysis of existing tourism development literature on business tourism in developing economies served as the basis for the arguments presented. Key issues highlighted in the paper include impacts on the supply of basic commodities and household income of the traders and business operations of the related businesses in the formal sector, traders’ survival strategies during the course of the national lockdown, and implications on the way forward. Furthermore, the study offers conclusions and implications drawn from the themes formulated from these key issues. The study also provides insights on the vulnerability of the informal business tourism sector to unforeseen occurrences, and how the affected stakeholder can recover from such a blow.

This study sought to determine the sociodemographic influences on residents' perceptions of tourism development in Zimbabwe. The study emanates from a concern over the lack of such a research angle in the context of subSaharan African tourism research. Adopting an explorative quantitative design, a structured survey was used to generate 246 valid responses from the residents in Harare. The results obtained showed that there were both similarities and differences in the perceptions of residents with different sociodemographic characteristics. The study brought to light that sociodemographic characteristics are an important variable in determining the influences of residents' perceptions of tourism development. This article offers developing destinations augmented insight into the influence of demographic characteristics on residents' perceptions of tourism development, as well as discernments respecting tourism planning, policy formulation, strategy implementation, and tourism marketing in transforming communities and enhancing destination's image.

This study seeks to investigate the capacity of domestic tourism to revive the tourism industry in South Africa during uncertain times using the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors argue that domestic tourism should be promoted as a way of offsetting losses experienced when international tourism is in decline. The purpose of the empirical study was to assess perceptions and attitudes regarding domestic tourism in South Africa. A self-selected sample of 350 respondents living in South Africa were asked about their travel behaviour and tourism practices in 2019 and 2020 as well as their post-pandemic travel plans. The authors believe that domestic tourism has the capacity to stimulate tourism growth in uncertain times after the recent pandemic, as most of the respondents indicated their willingness to travel more domestically after the pandemic and to engage in different types of local tourism. However, they emphasized the need to reduce prices in order to ensure that domestic customers could afford domestic tourism products offered the during times of external shocks.