With the pandemic of the early 2020s coming to a close, city politicians and planners around the world seek to bring in more tourists and entrepreneurs to assist their local businesses and domestic economies in the return to pre-pandemic levels. There exists a myriad of ways city officials attempt to attract visitors from festivals and fireworks displays to citywide initiatives and awareness programs. This study takes a look at a destination’s perceived coolness, how it is manifested through destination service quality and tourist app use, and how it affects an individual’s revisit intention based on structural and interpersonal constraints.

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.

Destination branding has become an important trend in modern tourism. The development of destination brands has become a strategic tool worldwide because of the growing competition between destinations. In recent years, many tourist destinations have combined unique, creative, and attractive elements to transform themselves into “cool” tourist destinations. Destination brand coolness refers to tourists’ subjective and positive perception of tourist destinations and their beliefs that the destination brand offer distinctive, novel characteristics and attributes that the visitors are attracted to. Creating destination brand coolness can help tourist destinations differentiate themselves from their competitive counterparts, thereby attracting tourists. However, no study has conceptualized the construct of destination brand coolness, let alone developing scales that measure destination brand coolness.

This study addresses the influence that the use of social media for posting travel-related content has on holiday destination choice. The study builds upon the Theory of Conspicuous Behavior and the Theory of Planned Behaviour and aims at understanding whether expected Social Return, referring to the amount of positive feedback that travel posts have on social media, is a determining factor of destination decisions. A model entailing E-Word of Mouth, Social Return, Attitudes, Subjective Norm, Perceived Control and Intention to Visit is proposed and tested with a survey of 177 respondents who had an Instagram account. Data was analyzed using Structured Equation Modelling. The results highlight that Instagram promotes social recognition attributed to e-tourists that share a travel experience considered charming and trendy. Such social recognition is tangibilized by the constructs of e-WOM and social return. The study finds that the intention to visit is impacted by e-WOM, Social Return and Subjective Norm. However, the impact of Attitudes and Perceived Behavioral Control on the Intention to Visit was not supported.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) refers to the customer's perception of being anxious for not engaging in an experience. FOMO is an anxiety feeling positively associated with social media usage that one cannot catch up on something important in life. Fear of missing out (FOMO) marketing appeals initiated from social media usage were found to significantly affect consumer purchase decisions including choice of destination. Consumers usually browse social media and social networking sites such as forums and reviews in online tourism agents (OTAs) when they make travel decisions. Although FOMO is expected to affect tourists' perception and urgency in making a tourism decision, the use of FOMO-laden message to promote travel destination through different types of influencers has not yet been widely studied. This study fills this research gap by examining the effect of using FOMO laden content to promote travel destination through different types of influencers. An online experiment was conducted with four experimental conditions in which different influencers share about a destination using the same FOMO-laden message: (1) travel KOL, (2) tourists who post user-generated-content (UGC), (3) personal friends, and (4) a control condition with the absence of influencer and FOMO message. The 984 respondents were randomly assigned into one of the four experimental conditions. Data collected was analysed using PLS-SEM and PLS-MGA. Results indicated that anticipated elation, anticipated envy, and social influence predicted 30.2% variance of FOMO and FOMO explained 31.6% of variance of intention to visit the destination promoted. Multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA) found that exposure to message shared by travel KOL and personal friends significantly strengthen the FOMO feeling of participants resulting in strong intention to visit the destination promoted. UGC posted by tourists showed similar effect as the non-FOMO laden control group and are less significant in driving the FOMO feeling that leads to visit intention. Findings of this study provide insights into how effectiveness of destination promotion can be enhanced by using FOMO-laden message on social media through influential influencers.

본 연구는 남원 관광목적지 네트워크를 분석하여 관광지 관리방안을 도출하기 위하여 수행되 었다. 이를 위해 남원 주요 관광지 4개소에서 조사된 설문지를 가지고 관광행태 분석(n=552)과 사회네트워크 분석(n=311)을 진행하였다. 남원에서 하루 이내로 체류하는 관광객의 비율이 매 우 높으며 방문 관광지수도 2곳 이내로 한정되어 있다. 그러므로 활성화를 위해 관광객의 체류 시간을 증대할 수 있는 관광지관리 전략의 수립이 요구된다. 남원 관광지 중심성 분석 결과, 광 한루원이 절대적 우위를 차지하고 있었다. 광한루원은 명실공히 남원의 대표적 관광지이자 관 광 네트워크의 핵심적인 역할을 하는 관광지라 할 수 있다. 광한루원을 중심으로 인접한 남원 관광단지를 비롯하여 시내권 관광지를 연계하는 전략이 필요하다. 매개 중심성이 높은 정령치 를 중심으로 지리산권 관광지를 연계하는 콘텐츠의 확대가 요구되며 나아가 시내권 관광지와 지리산권 관광지를 연계할 수 있는 관광거점으로서의 관광지관리 전략을 수립해야 한다. 혼불 문학관은 북부권 대표적 관광지로 거리상 인접한 시내권 관광지와 연계하는 전략이 요구된다. 남원은 시내권, 북부권, 지리산권으로 관광지가 산재되어 있으나 관광객은 특정 장소에 편중되 므로 관광콘텐츠 및 관광지의 적절한 연계와 체류시간 연장을 유도하는 관광 프로그램의 개발 은 남원 관광의 매력을 향상시킬 수 있을 것이다.