The Impact of AI-Empowered Immersive Technologies on Tourist Experience and Behavioral Intention
摘要
Tourism is one of the top industries that adopts technology. Artificial intelligence-empowered immersive technologies are among the emergent novel innovations that benefit tourism marketing and innovate its strategies and effectiveness. These technologies have revolutionized the exploration of tourists’ needs and preferences, responding to their queries; offering tourist destinations, attractions, and activities interactively; and enriching tourist experience and fostering visitation intentions. These technologies focus on the cognitive and emotional aspects of the tourist visits to create memorable, meaningful travel experiences. It has a powerful impact on the storytelling techniques and engagement of tourists in the tourist experience. This chapter introduces some immersive technologies used in tourism marketing, including virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality; chatbots; gamification; the metaverse; and digital twins. It introduces each technology and its potential for tourism, marketing, and tourist experience. The recent technologies (i.e., extended reality, metaverse, and digital twin) embed previous technologies to produce a fully immersive environment for tourists in which they can explore destinations and combine the virtual and physical environments. Travel and tourism marketers should make good use of and benefit from the opportunities of immersive technologies in marketing destinations and attractions. They need to create immersive interactive content that fulfils the expectations of tourists, enhances the tourist engagement, and maximizes satisfaction, loyalty, and future visitation concepts. Tourism businesses are also in need of employing immersive technologies in their marketing campaigns to differentiate their brands, increase their competitive positions, enlarge their customer base, affect travel planning and purchasing decisions, and inspire tourists to visit destinations and experience them physically.