Could virtual reality effectively market slow travel in a heritage destination?

A recent trend in tourism research involves the application of high technology in marketing practices such as virtual reality (VR), cell phone apps, and new media. Among these, VR is the most novel. In 2016, Discovery Travel created TRVLR, which includes all seven continents. Even earlier, specific tourist destinations were providing VR content about their respective locales. These venues expose potential tourists to tourist locations by immersing them in a visceral, 360-degree storytelling setting. However, while VR has gradually grown in popularity in the tourism industry, the marketing effects have been infrequently studied by academia. This research asked participants to view a VR presentation of a famous 700-year-old Chinese painting, and investigated viewers' nostalgia and ST travel intentions. Information was collected from 308 samples at certain popular tourist destinations around Fuzhou in the Fujian Province of China, and Taipei and Taoyuan in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling was then used to analyze the collected data and test the hypotheses. The findings indicate that VR is a very useful tool for encouraging respondents to travel to Jinan in a slower and more intensely observational manner, significantly arousing their sense of nostalgia and leading to a strong intention to ST to Jinan. This research provides important insights into how this new technology might function as a tool for marketing Jinan, a tier-two but historically important destination in China. The implications of these findings are important to understanding the associations for potential tourists among VR use, destination marketing, and travel intention, particularly when the object city is relatively unknown.