HOW TO EFFECTIVELY ACTIVATE TOURISTS’ MENTAL SIMULATION: PRESENTING DESTINATION PHOTOS WITH HUMAN PRESENCE
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Imagination plays a critical role in travel decision-making. Given the intangible nature of tourism products, tourists cannot directly experience and evaluate the tourism resources in advance. Thus, tourists must first mentally predict and imagine the future travel experiences and scenarios in the destination based on the marketing information (e.g., travel photo, promo video) and prior knowledge, then form their subjective evaluation of the travel product. This future-thinking process is called “mental simulation”. Stacks of research have shown that mental simulations positively affect travel behavior (Le et al., 2019). However, given that travel is a kind of novelty-seeking activity, tourists are usually not familiar with the destination environment and activities. The lack of prior knowledge might inhibit their mental simulation process, even if destination photos and videos are provided. Thus, how to effectively arouse tourists’ mental simulation of destination experience is an important question for effective tourism marketing.