Homestays are increasingly marketed as locally embedded experience products, yet their attractiveness is often explained through destination- or hotel-derived attribute frameworks. This study contextually identifies and examines a user-generated content (UGC)-driven model of homestay attractiveness in Yunnan, China, within the cognition-affect-conation framework. Study 1 analyses 30,076 Ctrip reviews through latent Dirichlet allocation topic modelling, TF-IDF analysis, and grounded-theory coding, identifying seven dimensions of homestay attractiveness. Study 2 uses 307 valid questionnaires and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to assess the measurement and structural models. The findings show that Accessibility, Leisure Activity, Landscape Image, and Room Physical and Aesthetic Attractiveness significantly enhance Service and Affective Attractiveness, which in turn improves social evaluation attractiveness. Service and Affective Attractiveness also mediates the effects of these four cognitive dimensions on social evaluation attractiveness. Safety operational process management attractiveness has no significant direct or indirect effect, suggesting that it mainly functions as a basic assurance attribute in highly rated, frequently reviewed, and highly visible Yunnan homestays. This study contributes a context-sensitive explanation of homestay attractiveness and clarifies how UGC-derived attractiveness cues can inform market positioning, platform communication, experience design, and online reputation management.
This study investigates how the same experiential attributes play different roles in shaping visitor experience evaluations and emotional responses across six theme park types. Based on 1660 questionnaires, a theme park experience scale was developed for cross-type comparison. The findings show that the psychological characteristics of experience dimensions vary across park types in their functional roles and cognitive–affective nature. Drawing on the Kano model and the ABC model of attitudes, experience dimensions are classified by their functional roles and cognitive–affective nature. Integrating the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) framework and Cognitive Appraisal Theory, this study proposes a context-dependent SOR framework, demonstrating how identical experiential attributes generate different psychological characteristics and emotional responses across environmental contexts.
Tourism short videos have become a crucial tool for sparking travel inspiration. However, how to integrate different short-video elements to enhance marketing effectiveness remains underexplored. Grounded in the elaboration likelihood model, this study investigates the matching effects and underlying mechanisms between visual perspective (first-person vs. third-person) and tourism activity type (challenging vs. relaxing). The research approach contains one secondary data analysis and three scenario-based experiments. Our findings indicate that in tourism short videos, relaxing activities combined with a third-person perspective evoke aesthetic pleasure, whereas challenging activities paired with a first-person perspective elicit awe, both of which enhance travel inspiration. Additionally, language arousal moderates the aforementioned matching effect and its indirect effect on travel inspiration through awe. This article enriches theoretical research on tourism short video marketing by confirming the integration framework of visual and language elements, and offers practical insights for different tourism activity marketing.
The present study explores Generation Z's (Gen-Z's) perceptions, motivations, and participation in village tourism, emphasizing the role of tourism literacy. Drawing on generational cohort theory and thematic analysis of interviews with 50 participants in Banyuwangi, Indonesia, the research examines how Gen-Z characteristics shape engagement in rural tourism. The findings reveal that digital nativeness, social connectivity, experiential learning preferences, and sustainability awareness encourage participation beyond tourism consumption toward active promotion, cultural preservation, and environmental stewardship. Participants use digital platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Smart Kampung to promote destinations, while educational and institutional programs strengthen tourism literacy through interactive learning. Gen-Z also contributes to local festivals, tourism ambassador programs, and environmental initiatives. The study advances existing knowledge by demonstrating that tourism literacy serves as a key mechanism linking generational characteristics to meaningful participation in village tourism. It extends generational cohort theory by highlighting literacy-driven capacities that position Gen-Z as cocreators of sustainable tourism and community development.
When dating app users browse potential partners' travel photos, partner-quality judgments emerge before conscious evaluation begins. Destination choice operates as a resource signal in dating contexts, automatically triggering cognitive associations that precede rational scrutiny. This study introduces predictive signal binding (PSB), a novel construct capturing how the brain automatically links destination resource cues to partner-quality inferences. Using the implicit association test (IAT), we measure this cross-domain binding across three sequential studies. Results establish PSB as a robust preconscious mechanism (IAT D = 0.71) operating independently of explicit partner evaluations (rho = .02). Authentic destination signals suppress PSB binding, but only under high-resource conditions (d = 0.80). This suppression is mediated by conscious belief updating rather than direct preconscious penetration. Together, these findings reframe destination-based partner evaluation from a deliberate cognitive process to an automatic binding within the brain's predictive system, offering new theoretical and practical implications for dating tourism research.
