Visual attention elicits focal scenes, facilitates attention restorativeness capacity, and provokes stress appraisal processes for tourists. This study explores tourists’ visual attention and stress appraisals and examines how situational factors (e.g., COVID-preventive measures and natural sound) may affect stress appraisal processes by a mixed-methodology involving observations, eye-tracking experiments, and post-experiment surveys. Findings suggest that tourists’ attention to natural landscape decreases with crowding stimuli. Natural landscape’s attention restoration capacity may influence tourists’ cognitive appraisals of stress when the crowding stimuli were low or medium, but the impacts are minimal when the crowding stimuli were high. Moreover, natural sound can serve as the complementary of visualscape to facilitate tourists’ attention restorativeness capacity and mitigate stress. We suggest that mask-wearing can reduce tourists’ attention to human crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings extend the attention restoration theory by a multi-sensory perspective and the transactional theory of stress through eye-tracking analytics.