An increasing number of studies have recently elucidated the serious negative effects of tourist crowding. However, how tourists cope with crowding and adopt adaptive responses remains unclear. Thus, this study qualitatively identified the mechanism of tourist crowding perception of adaptive behavior from interviewees and then quantitatively validated the mechanism through the mediation of tourist fatigue and negative emotions, as well as the moderation of peer emotion contagion. Tourists were more likely to return to a destination and engage in temporal replacement behavior through the mediating effect of tourist fatigue, but it was also found that peer emotional contagion interferes with two paths that explain how tourist crowding perception influences tourist emotion change or state variation, impacting adaptive behavior responses. Consequently, we recommend diverting tourists, focusing on alleviating fatigue and negative emotions and channeling the peers’ negative emotions to mitigate the negative impact of tourist crowding.
