Understanding the Virtual Experiential Value and Its Effect on Travel Intention

: This paper explores how tourism virtualisation enables consumers to experience memorable feelings in the virtual world and affects the experiential value of virtual tourism and customers’ intention to travel in the future. A virtual reality system, The Panoramic Palace Museum, is utilised to conduct a sequence of experiments in tourism experience, and two phases are designed to analyse travel intention. Before using the virtual-reality system, the theory of planned behaviour constructs and involvement are employed to explore travel intention. Two identical experiments are conducted on 243 subjects independently, and 211 valid samples are collected. The results show that travel intentions before and after a virtual visit are significantly different and that experiential value significantly increases the intention to travel.