COVID-19 pandemic is often discussed as an imposed pause of humanity’s frantic growth and an opportunity to reflect on our choices and future paths (Gretzel et al., 2020; Ioannides and Gyimóthy, 2020. As the world is now focusing in mitigating the adverse impacts of the pandemic and bringing economy and tourism ‘back to business’, measures taken in the pressure of emergency to combat economic recession from COVID-19, sustainability goals should not be overlooked or neglected (Hall et al., 2020). At the same time, it is a period of transition and innovation; crises can be a disruption leading to innovations. This research develops around a new project funded by Tillväxtverket which focuses on eliciting the knowledge and the experience generated during the pandemic crisis to attain a more sustainable development of tourism in the “new normal” after the crisis. During the presentation, an overview of the project will be given and some preliminary results from interviews with companies in Dalarna and Gotland will be presented. We look onto how companies have responded to the pandemic so far and how they work with sustainability and climate change. The aim is to better understand vulnerability and resilience among tourism companies and contribute to a more sustainable tourism in the new normal. In this project we undertake a transformative approach which acknowledges the presence of diverse interests and tensions and which employs collaborative and disruptive methods to work with. It also integrates a transformative approach in analysing and discussing the preliminary results and the role of companies in climate change and sustainability in the new normal. Transformative approaches thus are integrated in the ontological as well as epistemological foundations of this research. Very importantly, methodologically we work with collaborative disruptive methods to trigger transformation in the system and enable a discussion with stakeholders around systemic changes in our understandings of development, vulnerability, climate change and sustainability