PONE-D-20-33157

Developing a sustainability strategy for Taiwan’s tourism industry after the COVID-19 pandemic

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Tsai,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 07 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Bing Xue, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2.  We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions.

In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts:

a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent.

b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories.

We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear Editor and Author(s),

I read the manuscript and I found it very beneficial manuscript to serve the country in best regarding with the tourism. The paper would provide the items can be sold to the tourist in their country with the best demanded one. Therefore, to help the country regarding with the products and services in best this paper would serve in best.

Reviewer #2: Introduction:

Firstly, why do you use two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) and principal component analysis (PCA)? Are there any obvious benefit of DEA and PCA in this study, and what are the drawbacks of other major methods in this study? Or put why you use these methods in the "Methodology part" for explanation.

Secondly, the application value of the paper is clearly explained, but does this study have theoretical and academic value? Whether there are academic theoretical shortcomings that need to be remedied in the context of the Taiwan region regarding the economic recovery of tourism after the epidemic? The academic research question of the paper is not very clear? Are you trying to find out where is the highest consumption area in Taiwan, or the greatest contribution to the tourism industry in Taiwan? From my judgment, you may want to look for reasonable sustainability strategy for the tourism economy after the COVID-19, and those small questions ( the highest consumption area or the greatest contribution to the tourism industry) are only for this main research question, therefore, in the Introduction part, you need to concentrate on deriving your research question reasonably and explaining its theoretical significance (if there is an ideal theoretical significance), so that it seems to be more logical in the Introduction part, otherwise it may make readers confused.

Related Works:

firstly, delete “The United Nations World Tourism Organization” (in line 83), because you've explained in line 56 exactly what UNWTO stands for.

Secondly, the part (the Current status of the international tourism market) is actually quite repetitive with the Introduction part, so it is suggested to simplify this part or enrich the main content of this part into the Introduction part.

Thirdly, “New vaccines may be developed soon, so there is hope that the epidemic will end within a few months. However, international tourists may not come back as soon as expected. Moreover, consumer behavior may change temporarily or even forever. Therefore, how to attract international tourists to visit Taiwan again as soon as possible is a very important question, and the country must focus on those tourists who are most helpful to their operational performance so that the industry can recover in the shortest time possible.” (in line 137-141)

Whether these above contents have basis or document source, or just your guess and judgment.

Methodology:

It is recommended to make a table or figure to illustrate the benefits of the two methods (in fact, you had mentioned in your literature review, but they look scattered.), and point out why it is suitable to analyze statistics of visitors to Taiwan from the Tourism Bureau, so that the characteristics of the research methods ( DEA-CCR model and PCA) will be more clear.

Results:

Firstly, the part of “Two-stage DEA analysis” (in line 247-263) is recommended to be put into the "Methodology" part, because it is redundant to put it in the "Results" part.

Secondly, you should know that COVID-19 is probably confirmed by outstanding medical scientists around the world and may have existed before December 2019, but COVID-19 really obviously negative affects the global tourism industry after January 2020. and it is possible that the Taiwan region will be affected by the obvious negative impact of the new crown epidemic after January 2020. And you used the DEM method to analyze the data from 2014 to 2018. Although it can reflect the distribution and consumption of tourists to Taiwan during the period before the new crown epidemic to a certain extent, there is still a lack of key tourist statistics for 2019. You used the Two-stage DEA method to analyze the data from 2014 to 2018, although it can reflect to a certain extent the distribution and consumption of tourists who visited Taiwan during the period before the COVID-19 pandemic, however, there is still a lack of key tourist statistics in 2019 and some valuable data in 2020 after the epidemic. As the statistics from 2014 to 2018 are far away from the time node of the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact of the new epidemic is changing rapidly, significant changes can occur within a few days. The most critical problem is that you lack key data within a period of time (maybe one month) before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. This is what you need to make up for. It is recommended that you adopt Big data methods to capture relevant valuable data.

Thirdly, did you consider the reliability and validity of the statistical data in the principal component analysis? I did not see a clear explanation in the Results part of your manuscript.

Discussion:

There is no obvious problem, and it is recommended to streamline the discussion.

Conclusions:

In the conclusion part, it is not clear what is the specific strategies of sustainability strategy for Taiwan’s tourism industry?

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Review result of PONE-D-20-33157.docx

Developing a sustainability strategy for Taiwan’s tourism industry after the COVID-19 pandemic

PONE-D-20-33157R1

Dear Dr. Tsai,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Bing Xue, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #2: Partly

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #2: Congratulations, and strive to make this research problem clearer next time and have more supporting data.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #2: No