How do destination brand biographies influence tourist forgiveness in crisis contexts

Effectively promoting tourist forgiveness is key to mitigating the adverse impacts of destination crisis events on tourism development. However, existing research on crisis response strategies has not examined the impact of emotional narrative strategy represented by brand biography on tourist forgiveness. To address this gap, this study uses brand biography as the narrative medium, moves beyond the previous single perspective focused on underdog narratives by adopting a dual perspective of underdog and top dog narratives, and, grounded in the Cognitive–Affective Personality System (CAPS) theory and the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), derives the following main conclusions from four scenario experiments. First, underdog brand biographies significantly enhance tourist forgiveness by evoking positive empathy, whereas top dog brand biographies restore forgiveness by increasing perceived safety, albeit less effectively. Second, tourists’ decision-making styles and crisis types serve as boundary conditions moderating these effects. These findings clarify the key content constructions by which destination brand biographies mitigate the negative impacts of crisis events through different pathways, and provide theoretical support and practical implications for destinations to accurately match brand narrative strategies with crisis types and tourists’ decision-making styles.