Fostering sustainable tourism through digital innovation and green tourism initiatives in Bangladesh

Tourism, a vital global industry, has faced significant setbacks due to health crises like COVID-19 and monkeypox, reshaping global travel perceptions around the world, including in Bangladesh. As a vital industry interconnected with the country's economy, it is crucial to understand the pandemic's impact on Bangladesh's tourism industry and identify ways to recover from its negative effects. To that end, we employ a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modeling framework to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on Bangladesh's tourism industry and highlight the role of digital innovation in recovery. We simulate multiple policy experiments and find that expediting digital innovation can help the tourism industry recover from the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic without any negative macroeconomic consequences. Moreover, we develop a conceptual framework that shows the interplay of stakeholders for augmenting digitization in the tourism industry, leading to green tourism development. To achieve sustainable tourism through digitization, we propose policies to ensure effective industry planning, diffusion, and decision-making among the stakeholders in the tourism industry.