Digitalization‐Enabled Resilience During the COVID‐19 Pandemic: Evidence From Tourism Enterprises

ABSTRACT The COVID‐19 pandemic and associated social distancing policies significantly challenged the organizational resilience of enterprises, especially those belonging to the contact‐intensive services. For enterprises whose business models traditionally rely on face‐to‐face interaction, whether—and through which mechanisms—digitalization can mitigate such vulnerability remains underexplored. Using the high‐frequency stock data of China's A‐share listed tourism enterprises and an observation window of almost 3 years when China's strict pandemic prevention and control policies took effect, this paper finds that digitalization significantly enhances organizational resilience during the COVID‐19 pandemic, reflected in less stock price damage after the shock. The boost effect is more pronounced in for enterprises located in regions with high government attention to tourism and digital payment levels as well as non‐SOEs. Besides, only artificial intelligence and big data analytics technologies in digitalization play a positive role in the resilience of tourism enterprises. Further mechanism analysis suggests that digitalization enhances the resilience of tourism enterprises through reducing supply chain concentration, increasing investor attention, and facilitating access to syndicated bank loans. These findings underscore the importance of digitalization in enabling contact‐intensive enterprises to withstand and recover from external disruptions, offering valuable insights for both theoretical advancement and practical application in crisis management.