The growth of tourists visiting rural and mountainous areas is evident with the sprawling of numerous new business enterprises where lakes are often located. Lakes are good alternative tourists’ sites for sun, sea, sand tourism. Due to international travel restrictions, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for further development of lake attractions to boost the local economy and encourage local travel to the rural and mountain areas. Developing sustainable lake tourism sites could be a viable means to improve the life of the local communities near the lakes and initiate further sustainable tourism development. One of the critical elements in sustainable tourism development is local involvement in the development process and management. While this is understood in other tourism domains in the literature, limited attention is attributed to lakes as tourist sites. Thus, the study focuses primarily on identifying and assessing the locals’ satisfaction and its influence on their support for sustainable lake tourism development. This project could provide policy-makers and managers of lake tourism sites a better understanding of locals’ satisfaction with the success of sustainable tourism development, provide insights for the design of sustainable lake tourism development, and craft short and medium-term plans and resource allocation decisions.