PREreview of Post-Pandemic Adaptation Strategies in Sustainable Tourism: Financial Market Reactions and Investor Perceptions

Write a short summary of the research’s main findings and how this work has moved the field forward.

This research provides a rigorous, large-scale quantitative analysis of how financial markets value the post-pandemic adaptation strategies of publicly listed tourism and hospitality firms. Using an event study methodology on a global sample of 588 corporate announcements from 2020-2023, the study finds:

Positive Aggregate Reaction: Announcements of adaptation strategies, in general, generate significant positive cumulative abnormal returns (CAAR of 0.81% over a 3-day window), indicating investor approval.

A Hierarchy of Investor Valuation: The market's reaction is highly discerning:

         .Strongest for Technology & Sustainability: Technological integration (CAAR: 1.25%) and sustainability-driven initiatives (CAAR: 1.05%) elicit the strongest positive responses. Investors view these as tangible investments with clear links to efficiency, risk mitigation, and long-term value.

       .Weaker for Community & Crisis Management: Announcements related to community empowerment (CAAR: 0.45%) and crisis management frameworks (CAAR: 0.30%) receive statistically weaker and more uncertain market reactions. Their benefits are perceived as more intangible, long-term, and difficult to quantify.

How it moves the field forward: This work makes a significant contribution by bridging a critical gap between qualitative sustainable tourism literature and quantitative financial economics. It moves the discourse from describing what strategies firms are adopting to quantifying how the market (and thus, investors) value them. It provides much-needed empirical evidence for the "business case" for sustainability and technology investments, while also revealing a "valuation gap" for social and governance strategies, offering a data-driven reality check for policymakers and corporate strategists.

Major issues

• List significant concerns about the research, if there are any.

• These are significant concerns that should be addressed before the manuscript can be considered for publication, as they potentially impact the validity and interpretation of the results.

  1. Event Contamination and Confounding Events: The authors state they excluded announcements confounded by other major news (e.g., earnings, M&A) within a [-1, +1] window. However, for a global sample of large firms, a 3-day window is likely insufficient. Major strategic announcements often cluster. A stricter exclusion window (e.g., [-5, +5]) or a more sophisticated method (e.g., using Factiva to screen for confounding headlines explicitly) is necessary to ensure the measured abnormal returns are truly attributable to the adaptation strategy announcement and not to other concurrent news. This is a potential critical flaw in the research design.

  2. Sample Selection Bias ("The Good Firms Announce"): The study acknowledges the potential for self-selection bias but does not adequately address it. The core issue is that firms making substantive strategic announcements are likely systematically different from those that do not (e.g., better managed, more financially robust). Therefore, the positive abnormal returns could be partly driven by the market's perception of firm quality rather than the strategy itself. While firm controls are used in the cross-sectional regression, they cannot fully capture unobservable management quality. A more robust approach would be to use a propensity score matching technique, comparing announcing firms to a control group of non-announcing firms with similar observable characteristics (size, leverage, pre-pandemic performance).

  3. Causality and Endogeneity in the Cross-Sectional Regression: The regression model (Table 5) is presented as explaining the determinants of CAR. However, this is a correlational analysis, not a causal one. The model does not, and cannot, account for the possibility that the type of strategy a firm chooses is itself endogenous. For example, a highly innovative firm might be more likely to choose a technology strategy, and its stock might react more positively because it's an innovative firm, not because it's a technology announcement. The results should be framed more cautiously as describing associations rather than establishing definitive drivers.

  4. Lack of a True "No Adaptation" Baseline: The study compares different types of adaptation but lacks a baseline comparison to firms that announced no significant adaptation strategies during the period. Including an analysis of such a control group would significantly strengthen the main finding (H1) that adaptation, in general, is rewarded.

Minor issues

• List concerns that would improve the overall flow or clarity but are not critical to the understanding and conclusions of the research.

• These are suggestions to improve clarity, flow, and depth without challenging the core conclusions.

  1. Clarity on the "Substantive vs. Symbolic" Extension: The analysis in Section 7.4 is presented as a "hypothesized model" with illustrative results. This isn't very clear. If the authors did not actually perform this analysis, it should be removed and saved for the "Future Research" section. If they did perform it, even on a subsample, the actual results should be reported. As it stands, it reads as speculative and out of place in the "Robustness" section.

  2. Definition of "Crisis Management" Events: The examples given ("resilience plan," "crisis management team") seem vague. It would be helpful to provide a concrete example or two from the data of what qualified as a substantive crisis management announcement to give the reader a better sense of what was actually being valued (or not valued) by the market.

  3. Discussion of the Negative Coefficients for Size and Leverage: The finding that smaller and less leveraged firms experience higher abnormal returns is interesting but under-discussed. The authors should elaborate more on the potential implications. Does this suggest these signals are more impactful for firms whose value is more tied to future growth options? This is a ripe area for deeper interpretation.

  4. Reference Formatting and Consistency: Some references seem placeholder-like or incomplete (e.g., Lapotulo & Amalia, 2024, with a Preprints.org URL; Rahman, Saud, & Nawaz, 2024, by "Penrose Publishing"). The author list should ensure all references are to published or formally accepted works and are formatted consistently with the journal's guidelines.

  5. Data Availability Statement: The current statement ("not readily available because due to technical/fime [sic] limitations") is weak and non-standard. A stronger, more transparent statement is expected, even if the data is available upon request. This should be clarified.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.