ABSTRACT The tourism and hospitality industry is the hardest-hit industry, owing to the disruptions from COVID-19. The tourism sector witnessed a mounting loss of about 2.86 trillion dollars during the pandemic period. Exploring how inbound international tourists’ perception gets affected by uncertainty originating from the pandemics can have important insights to revive tourism during the new normality. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the impact of the pandemics and global economic uncertainty on international inbound tourist arrivals to Taiwan, a major travel destination of the East during the period 1997 to 2020. In particular, we augment the traditional demand model of tourism with economic uncertainty indicators and disaster and pandemic dummies, to explore the impact on visitor arrivals in Taiwan from major countries around Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe, and America. To this end, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) along with the modified Wald test of Toda Yamamoto (T-Y) was applied. The empirical results depict that apart from the pandemics, the global economic policy uncertainty has adverse implications on international tourism demand. The findings have important policy implications. Recovery of tourism demand should move along: i) new concepts on products; ii) new destination imagery and iii) marketing strategies through collaboration from the state.