Would You Still Travel to Wuhan? Empathy, Destination Image, and Travel Willingness in the Post-Pandemic Period: The Intermediary Role of Destination Image

With the normalization of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, people are encouraged to stay at home as much as possible. This has deeply affected the tourism industry. The tourism market size is decreasing sharply, and the restoration of tourism destinations faces great difficulties. Wuhan, the first city to have fought the COVID-19 pandemic head-on, attracted all Chinese people's attention, as everybody said, "come on, Wuhan!" on social media and lent it great support in fighting the pandemic. People discussed the pandemic, became more aware about Wuhan, made plans to travel to Wuhan after the pandemic, and celebrated the stage victory when Wuhan was reopened, which constitutes a meaningful phenomenon in the tourism industry. To reveal the theoretical relationship between people's empathy and travel willingness, this article crawls the microblog data of Wuhan for one month before and after the reopening, from March 24 to April 23, and introduces the destination image as a mediator variable to reflec