Cultural tourism has always been recognized as the heart of the new tourism trend, and Chinese culture has received increasing attention worldwide. Cultural tourism to China delivers the values of traditional Chinese culture and provides a satisfying authentic experience for tourists. Experience is an emotional reflection of tourists’ true feelings and evaluations during the tourism process and encompasses more than the delivery of a physical product or service. Experience involves creating unique memories of destinations and is inimitable of the individual sensitivity for special events. While these creative experiences have received increasing attention from marketing scholars and various industry practitioners in general product domains, the creative experience factors of tourism systems remain unexplored. Furthermore, although the matter of experience affects tourists’ behaviors and attitudes, little is known regarding how Chinese culture affects tourists’ creative experiences, destination attachments and memories. The effects of cultural contacts and creative experiences on destination attachment and roles of satisfaction and attitudes should be considered with respect to the development of cultural and creative tourism.
This study proposes cultural contact as an important enabler of destination attachment. Moreover, we examine both how and when culture contacts enhance tourists’ destination attachments by considering two critical attributes as mediators, including creative experience (i.e., Escape and Recognition, Unique Involvement, Interactivity, Peace of Mind and Learning) and cultural memories. We also considered two elements of tourists’ behaviors (satisfaction and attitude) as important contingencies. We test and integrate our concepts of a moderated mediation framework using the cultural and creative tourism from a sample of 651 tourists. We discuss how our empirical results extend Chinese culture, creative experience, and destination attachment research and provide the study’s theoretical and managerial implications.

• Wen-Qi Ruan(Huaqiao University)
• Chih-Hsing Liu(Ming Chuan University)
• Yong-Quan Li(Huaqiao University)