The role of city honor designations in influencing tourism performance: Evidence from the National Civilized City program in China

Destinations are spending more time and money on city honor designations, without fully understanding how such certifications affect tourism performance. Using a difference-in-difference (DID) method and based on the quasi-experiment of the National Civilized City (NCC) designation program in China, this study examines the impacts of city honor designation on urban tourism performance based on the signaling theory. Empirical results from yearly panel data from 285 cities between 2003 and 2019 show that obtaining the honor designation promotes both domestic and international tourism and can be used as a powerful promotional tool. The findings remain valid after a number of robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the promotion effects decrease over time as more NCCs are designated, confirming that the saturation effect applies to NCC desig-nation. It also shows that NCC designation has a more significant tourism promoting effect in cities with more homogeneous destination images and in regions with more NCCs distributed.