ABSTRACT The tourism firm is vulnerable to suffering losses after restructuring owing to its sensitivity and vulnerability. This work investigates the foresight effect of investors’ ex-ante attention to a tourism firm on its future performance to help identify proper restructuring timing. The analysis uses a similar-scenarios-based modelling framework with dynamic concept masks (SSBMF-DCM), which integrates multiple mainstream forecasting models and can dynamically identify foresight factors according to changes in restructuring scenarios. The results show that: (1) Investors’ ex-ante attention has a foresight effect on the medium-term performance after tourism firms’ restructurings; (2) the foresight effect of two different forms of ex-ante attention displays channel heterogeneity; (3) SSBMF-DCM performs better than all benchmarks in forecasting tourism firms’ restructuring performance; (4) consideration of two industry particularities (small restructuring sample volumes available for tourism firms and the concept drift in tourism firms’ restructuring scenarios) improves the accuracy of restructuring decisions.