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This study aims to examine the underlying emotional process that explains how context-specific stimuli involved in virtual reality (VR) destinations translate into presence perceptions and behavioral intentions.

In total, 403 potential tourists participated in a self-administered online survey after they watched a randomly assigned VR tour. The Lavaan package in R software was used to conduct structural equation analysis and examine the proposed theoretical framework.

The results reveal that media content consisting of informativeness, aesthetics and novelty was positively related to users’ sense of presence in a VR tour. The effect of media content on presence was partially mediated by emotional arousal.

Managers and VR designers can create an emotive virtual tour that contributes to the user’s sense of presence to promote attraction to the target destination. The VR content needs to be informative, aesthetic and novel, which can excite users during the VR tour, portray virtual destinations clearly and eventually influence potential tourists’ visit intentions.

Research on the emotional mechanism to generate presence is still in its infancy. This study integrates presence theory into a conceptual framework to explore how media content influences presence and decision-making through the emotional mechanism.