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The paper aims to critically review the impact of COVID-19 on the local tourism, specifically the case of Danang city in Vietnam to help professionals and researchers alike to better understand, manage and recover from the tourism impacts and deal with transformational affordance of COVID-19. To achieve this, first, the paper discusses how the COVID-19 affected the tourism performance in Danang compared with the national performance before and during the pandemic. By doing this, the paper identifies the significant drop in international arrivals and its reliance on certain market segments that the tourism industry and academia should re-evaluate the current development model and design a more sustainable plan after the pandemic. The paper continues by discussing local problems in the tourism sector, projecting new trends after the pandemic for three major tourism stakeholders (namely tourism demand, supply and destination management organizations and policy makers) during three COVID-19 stages (response and recovery). This also provides an overview of the type and scale of the COVID-19 tourism impacts and implications for tourism research.