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This paper aims to understand Chinese tourists’ changing shopping experience in Macao. In scrutinizing reviews posted in the pre-COVID and during COVID eras, the study has identified changing patterns in Chinese tourists’ shopping experiences, including increased leisure components while shopping, decreased luxury pursuits and an improved overall leisure and shopping experience because of decreased prices in accommodation and a less crowded retail and leisure environment. An emergent opportunity to provide “retail-tainment” experience is discussed.

While travelling, tourists like to use mobile technology to share their travel experiences. This study aims to understand how the social value gained by tourists from sharing a travel experience with mobile technology affects their satisfaction with the travel experience through onsite mobile sharing behaviour.

A second-order hierarchical model is constructed to examine the moderated mediating role of onsite mobile sharing behaviour in improving tourists’ travel satisfaction. Through systematic sampling, 304 responses were collected at ten attraction points in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, China.

The results show that, compared with self-centred values (self-presentation and self-identification), other-centred values (building social connection and reciprocity) contribute more to forming social values of sharing. In addition, onsite mobile sharing behaviour partially mediates and moderates the effect of social values on travel satisfaction.

This study applies the social capital theory to identify the value gained by sharing travel experiences and empirically evaluates the impact of these values on the overall value of sharing travel experiences. This study also contributes to tourism research by examining the moderated mediating role of onsite mobile sharing behaviour in improving travel satisfaction. This study helps destination marketing to make strategies to motivate tourists to use mobile technology to share their travel experiences while travelling.

Heritage tourism is an increasingly popular form of tourism that allows individuals to connect with the past and immerse themselves in cultural and historical narratives. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore the intricate relationships among vicarious nostalgia (VNOS), memorable tourism experiences (MTEXs) and their collective influence on tourists’ behavioral intentions (BINTs). Additionally, this study examines the moderating effect of social return (SN) in the context of heritage tourism.

Data were gathered using a self-administered questionnaire from 259 tourists visiting heritage sites in Jaipur. The proposed model was tested using structural equation modeling.

The results confirmed that VNOS had a significant positive impact on BINT in the context of heritage tourism. The causal relationship between VNOS and BINT was fully mediated by MTEX. The results further verified that the presence of SN strengthens the association between MTEXs and BINT.

This research will guide the firms associated with heritage tourism to target specific cohorts interested in heritage tourism. Policymakers may find it easier to create unique offerings and packages that appeal to visitors interested in historical sites and produce memorable travel experiences. One key implication is to create “social media friendly spaces” at different locations of the sites. To increase tourism, managers may use the findings from this research to create plans for the ethical promotion and protection of cultural and natural heritage sites.

Overall, this research advances the understanding of the role of VNOS in heritage tourism by elucidating its cognitive and emotional aspects and their subsequent influence on the memorability of tourist experiences and BINT s. Additionally, by considering the moderating effect of SN, this study provides a comprehensive view of how these factors collectively shape tourists’ decisions and actions in the context of heritage destinations. This research has been conducted in the heritage city of Jaipur (North-Western India), which, surprisingly – despite its popularity as a heritage tourism site – has not been sufficiently explored in the scholarly research.

Wine tourism is gaining increasing popularity among Chinese tourists, making it necessary to thoroughly examine tourist behavior. While online reviews posted by wine tourists have been extensively studied from the perspectives of destinations and wineries, the perspective of the tourists themselves has been overlooked. To address this gap, this study aims to identify significant attributes intrinsic to the tourism experiences of Chinese wine tourists by adopting a text-mining approach from a tourist-centric perspective.

The authors use topic modeling to extract these attributes, calculate topic intensity to understand tourists’ attention distribution across these attributes and conduct topical sentiment analysis to evaluate tourists’ satisfaction levels with each attribute. The authors perform importance-performance analyses (IPAs) using topic intensity and sentiment scores. Furthermore, the authors conduct semistructured in-depth interviews with Chinese wine tourists to gain insights into the underlying reasons behind the key findings.

The study identifies eleven attributes for domestic wine tourists and seven attributes for outbound wine tourists. From the reviews of both domestic and outbound tourists, three common attributes have been identified: “scenic view”, “wine tasting and purchase” and “wine knowledge”.

According to the results of the IPAs, there is a pressing need for enhancements in the wine tasting and purchasing experience at domestic wine attractions. Additionally, managers of domestic wine attractions should continue to prioritize the positive aspects of the family trip experience and scenic views. On the other hand, for outbound wine attractions, it is crucial for managers to maintain their efforts in providing opportunities for wine knowledge acquisition, ensuring scenic views and upholding the reputation of wine regions.

First, this study breaks new ground by adopting a tourist-centric perspective to extract significant attributes from real wine tourism reviews. Second, the authors conduct a comparative analysis between Chinese wine tourists who travel domestically and those who travel abroad. The third novel aspect of this study is the application of IPA based on textual review data in the context of wine tourism. Fourth, by integrating topic modeling with qualitative interviews, the authors use a mixed-method approach to gain deeper insights into the experiences of Chinese wine tourists.

Given the scarcity of studies regarding religious food as a destination attraction and limited research on tourist halal food experience, this study aims to explore and compare halal food experience perceived by Muslim and non-Muslim tourists in a non-Islamic destination.

This study was carried out in a halal food street in Yuanjia Village, China. It used a qualitative approach and interviewed 16 Muslim tourists and 20 non-Muslim tourists.

Six themes and 18 attributes of halal food experience were identified. The findings revealed that Muslim tourists saw the reassuring options and religious value of halal food as important experiences. By contrast, the experiences of abundant choices, value for money, sensory pleasure and unique charm were frequently mentioned by non-Muslim tourists. The nature of halal food, the context of China (i.e. Chinese halal food culture) and the feature of research site (i.e. food operation of Yuanjia Village) work together to create such experiences.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to explore and compare halal food experiences of Muslim and non-Muslim tourists in a non-Islamic country (China). This study suggests that halal food could be an appealing destination attraction, even in non-Islamic destinations. Thus, this study contributes to a better understanding of the halal food experiences and assists destination marketers in promoting halal food.

Today's tourists seek authenticity and high-quality experiences. This chapter presents exploratory results from a tourist well-being project conducted in Madeira Island, Portugal. Using a tourism well-being scale, onsite and online data were collected in 2019. The study suggests that tourists with higher well-being are younger, have lower qualifications, are retired and/or students, first timers, and mainly Portuguese (mainland). Participants identify gastronomy, walk in nature, and landscape as the three most enjoyed activities/experiences. Results showed that tourists in Madeira want to have fun, experience something unique, and develop positive relationships. This study opens doors to offer customized experiences considering tourists psychological profile and their well-being.

This study aims to better understand tourists’ revisit intention from their perspectives of past and expected experience and to investigate whether the formation of revisit intention differs between tourists from different nationalities.

The sample consisted of 250 Indonesian tourists who have visited Australia and 275 Australian tourists who have visited Indonesia. The data were analysed by conducting structural equation modelling and multi-group analysis with group comparisons.

Indonesian tourists’ intention to revisit Australia was influenced by past feeling experience and expected experience, while Australian tourists’ intention to revisit Indonesia was influenced by past feeling and relating experiences and expected experience. Both samples differ significantly in terms of relations between experiences and revisit intention. The relationship between past thinking experience and revisit intention was positive for Indonesians but negative for Australians. The relationship between past relating and expected experience was positive for Australians but negative for Indonesians. In addition, the influence of expected experience on revisit intention was stronger for Australian than Indonesian tourists.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study, for the first time, enriches tourism literature in understanding revisit intention by investigating revisit intention in relation to both past and expected experiences, along with examining nationality differences in the revisit intention formation.

Proenvironmental hotels and hotels with green initiatives are emerging as a method to address environmental issues and respond to tourists’ environmental concerns. To better understand what can encourage reservations in proenvironmental hotels, this study aims to investigate the connection between the performing arts watching experience and the preference for such a hotel.

Five scenario-based experiments were conducted. A total of 1,024 participants for the five studies were recruited with the help of Credamo, a commonly used Chinese data collection platform.

The results indicated that viewing performing arts could increase tourists’ preferences for proenvironmental hotels. This phenomenon occurred due to the fact that performing arts watching experience can induce a psychological state of self-transcendence in individuals, which, in turn, can raise their levels of altruism, and ultimately lead to proenvironmental hotel choices. This effect will not occur, however, when people watch performing arts with either an extrinsic motivation or in an analytical state.

The findings of this study provide hotel managers with a novel approach to market the proenvironmental attributes of their hotels and to promote tourists’ proenvironmental behaviors.

This study proposes performing arts viewing experiences as a novel way to encourage proenvironmental hotel choice. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of the performing arts watching experience on tourist behavior.

An increasing number of immersive technologies have been adopted in museum tourism in response to shifting consumer habits in the digital era. In contrast, the authenticity experience of museum tourists relies on genuine relics, the environment and activities, which are ancient or traditional. This raises the question of whether tourists can perceive authenticity in immersive technology-based museum tourism. To address this question, this study aims to explore the impact of virtual reality (VR) attributes on tourists’ presence, tourism authenticity and subsequent behavioral intentions in virtual museums.

Data were collected via scenario-based surveys of participants who had taken virtual museum tours based on VR. A total of 174 effective questionnaires were collected for exploratory factor analysis via SPSS 25. Afterward, 597 questionnaires were obtained for confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis via Mplus 7.4.

A conceptual model of how VR attributes influence presence, authenticity and visit intention was developed. There is a chain intermediary between presence and visit intentions, from original authenticity to interactive authenticity and then to emotional authenticity. Technology readiness and museum familiarity moderate some relationships between VR attributes and presence.

The findings can guide museums in improving the use of VR. For example, managers can improve the quality of virtual systems and adopt various interactive forms to enhance tourists’ participation experiences.

These research findings contribute to the research area of immersive technology adoption, enhance the understanding of tourism authenticity in the new context of technology application and extend the presence-emotion-intention theory.

This study investigates to what extent the values perceived by tourists throughout cultural tours impact their overall satisfaction levels and behavioral intentions related to the destination. This study further examines the moderating role of tour guide competency in the relationship patterns concerned.

Empirical data were collected via a survey from 420 foreign tourists who visited Cappadocia and participated in guided cultural tours. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

Study results reveal that the effects of quality, emotional, monetary and social value perceptions of tourists gained through cultural tour experiences on their overall satisfaction levels and the effects of overall satisfaction on recommendation and revisit intention are positive and significant. Furthermore, the moderating role of tour guide competency is significant and positive in the relationships between quality value and satisfaction and between satisfaction and revisit intention.

This study offers a critical analysis of discoveries concerning the pivotal role of tour guide competency within the cultural tour experience.