How technology-enhanced experience affects festival host destination attitude and word-of-mouth? Evidence from Taiwan

ABSTRACTThis study explores the technology-enhanced tourist experience in a festival context to address destination attitude and word-of-mouth towards a destination. Drawing specifically from the cognitive -affective-behavioural framework, we propose and empirically examine a model that integrates perceived novelty, as the cognitive component. Joy, and positive surprise were treated as the affective antecedents of memorable tourism experience. Memorable tourism experience was treated as the affective component, and attitude towards the destination and word-of-mouth were treated as the behavioural component. Data were collected from 265 visitors who attended the 2019 Taiwan Lantern Festival, which innovatively employed advanced drone technology to create an unprecedented visitor experience. Our results indicate that perceived novelty is positively related with joy and positive surprise, and all three are further positively related with memorable tourism experiences. Memorable tourism experiences demonstrate positive spill-over effects of festival experience on attitudes and word-of-mouth towards the host destination. Our results confirm the value of novelty gained from the technology-enhanced tourist experience, the critical role of positive surprise as the key emotional antecedent to memorable tourism experiences and the spill-over effects of festival experience.KEYWORDS: Technology-enhanced experiencefestivalnoveltymemorable tourism experienceattitude towards destinationword-of-mouth AcknowledgementThe authors thank Eudora Tong for her assistance in this research.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsChing-Fu ChenChing-Fu Chen is a professor in the Department of Transportation and Communication Management Science, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. He has published numerous scholarly articles in, among others, Tourism Management, Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Service Management, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Transportation Research Part A, Transportation Research Part F, Transport Policy, and Journal of Air Transport Management.V.G. GirishV.G. Girish is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business Administration, The Catholic University of Korea. He earned his MSc and PhD from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan (UNESCO World Heritage Site), India, and MBA from National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. His research interest is on topics related to technology, tourism, sports, management, and education. His research is published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management, Current Issues in Tourism, Tourism Review, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, and other reputed outlets.