Different festival environments and transformations may provide conceptual resources for transforming tourism into more responsible and sustainable practices. Considering together the scientific methodology of two typically disparate ‘environments’, and Transformation Tourism, the COVID-19 pandemic was also treated as a spatial–temporal beginning for the transformation of the tourism industry. This study was also conducted to determine tourist behavior after the Covid-19 pandemic by identifying tourist typology and tourist travel motivations. A questionnaire-based survey method was used. An online survey was done, and responses were obtained from various tourist destinations of China. This approach also helps dismantle the mechanisms that perpetuate the pernicious aspects of host-host disparities in tourism. After the reopening of borders, starting of public mobility, and resumption of recreational activities, the transformative ability of festivals to transform their participants, both in and out of highly perforated times, is not to the extent that the distinction between guest and host is completely erased. The creative and community responses of such transformative festival cultures and past crises were linked to participation, civic responsibility, etc. Values were presented as an example of how people can help overcome shared emergencies and provision of further sustainable tourism during the COVID-19. Such a destructive intersubjective reversal was not temporary but an acknowledgment of the common humanity, participants of cumulative and transformative social and ecological projects.