Although virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology in tourism, little research has been conducted on what factors make consumers visit destinations presented by VR. To address this gap in the literature, this study developed a theoretical framework including authentic experience, cognitive and affective responses, attachment, and visit intention with VR tourism using a stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory. The results revealed significant impacts of authentic experience on cognitive and affective responses, indicating that authentic experience is an important factor in VR tourism. The study identified cognitive and affective responses as significant mediators in predicting attachment and visit intention. The results demonstrated that the intention to visit places shown in VR tourism was influenced by attachment to VR. Cognitive response had a stronger influence than affective response on the intention to visit a destination in VR. This study sheds light on why potential tourists visit destinations shown in VR.

Understanding the decision-making process and predicting travel behavior are critical for destination tourism marketers. This study develops and tests a structural equation model using the extended Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to explain Chinese college students’ intention to travel to Japan. Ten hypotheses were proposed regarding the relationships between destination image, travel constraints, and the original TPB constructs. The results of structural analyses reveal that the extended TPB has better predictive power for travel intention to Japan than the original one. Attitude is found to have the greatest impact on intention to travel to Japan. The mediating role of travel constraints shows a significantly negative effect on the relationships between the predictors and travel intention except for the relationship between perceived behavioral control and travel intention. The results of this study can help improve marketing promotions and the development of more effective destination positioning strategies for Japanese inbound tourism.

Human crowding at a festival can affect visitor satisfaction differently to spatial crowding. Festival visitors perceive human crowding as a situation in which the festival is full of people. Spatial crowding, on the other hand, is perceived as restricting movement. We hypothesized that human crowding affects visitor satisfaction in a positive way (by increasing positive affect and decreasing negative affect), whereas spatial crowding affects visitor satisfaction in a negative way (by decreasing positive affect and increasing negative affect). We tested these hypotheses using data collected through an on-site survey at the 2012 Seoul Lantern Festival in South Korea: 423 visitors attending the festival completed the survey. The survey results supported the hypotheses. Managerial implications of the findings are also discussed.