The Influence Of Tourists’ Pre-travel Mental Simulation On Their Subsequent Experience

Tourist experience is both a spatiotemporal transfer process and a series of related psychological activities.According to Larsen,a complete tourist experience is a succession of psychological activities that take place in the pre-travel,on-site,and post-travel stages.In this continuum,psychological activities take place in succession,with earlier activities inevitably influencing later ones.However,the academic community has been preoccupied with the on-site and post-travel stages of tourists over the last four decades.Research on the pre-travel stage is scarce,and there is hardly any on the impact of tourists’ pre-travel psychological activities on their subsequent experience.Travelling is a positive activity that carries significant personal meanings and mainly takes place in unusual environments.As the saying goes,‘the heart flies away long before the feet move’;people imagine possible scenarios that could occur during a trip before it actually begins.These anticipatory psychological activities not only allow people to steer the subsequent tourist experience to a predetermined goal,but also put them in simulated tourism scenarios to acquire a pre-taste of the mental pleasure to be obtained from the tourist experience.In other words,before actual tour activities begin,the tourist experience has already started in our mental world.Human visions and prospects of future tourist experiences are more lively and more elaborative than those for ordinary products.They are closely related to autobiographical memory and can arouse affective responses similar to those created by real-world experiences.Therefore,such visions and prospects are clearly different from mere expectation or imagination.Psychological activities of this kind are captured by ‘mental simulation’,a term in cognitive psychology first coined by Nobel economics laureate Kahneman et al.to describe the cognitive processing of episodic events.Marketing research on mental simulation has been preoccupied with its impact on consumers’ intention to purchase or use a product;whether such impact can sustain itself well after purchase is barely examined.The consumption of tourism products unlocks an experience that differs from consumers’ everyday routine.The real consumption experience value of the product is that tourists get engaging in the specific tourism situation and evaluate it afterwards.Therefore,the significance of mental simulation for the marketing of such products is not just to stimulate the purchase,it should have a deeper impact.Based on the review and evaluation of relevant literature,this study constructed a research framework consisting of “pre-travel mental simulation-on-site engagement-post-travel tourist satisfaction”.This framework draws on the Mental Simulation Theory,Associative Network Theory,Broaden-and-Build Theory,and other related theories.This study attempts to explore the following specific research questions:(1)Does pre-travel mental simulation affect post-travel tourist satisfaction?(2)What is the mechanism by which on-site engagement(cognitive engagement vs.affective engagement)affects the relationship between mental simulation(process simulation vs.outcome simulation)and tourist experience satisfaction?(3)Does different types of tourism experiences(cognitive tourism experience vs.hedonic tourism experience)impact the relationship between mental simulation and tourist experience satisfaction?In order to investigate the above questions,this study used relevant theories to propose corresponding research hypotheses,conducted field experiments to collect data,and applied a series of statistical methods to analyze the data.The results of the study supported the research hypotheses,specifically:(1)Pre-travel mental simulation can significantly improve post-travel tourist experience satisfaction.(2)The cognitive and affective engagement of tourists during their on-site experience mediates the influence of process and outcome simulations on tourist experience satisfaction levels.(3)Tourists who engaged in pre-travel process simulation reported higher levels of satisfaction in cognitive tourism experiences compared to hedonic tourism experiences.Tourists who engaged in pre-travel outcome simulation reported higher levels of satisfaction in hedonic tourism experiences compared to cognitive tourism experiences.To effectively measure the effect of mental simulation and avoid overestimating the correlation between variables due to single data source,this study also conducted eye-movement tracking experiments to explore the mediating effect of tourist engagement during on-site experience on the relationship between mental simulation and tourist experience satisfaction.Moreover,an eye-tracking experiment confirmed the mediating role of cognitive and affective engagement in the relationship between the two types of mental simulation and tourist satisfaction with their experience.This study consists of the following six chapters:Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the theoretical and practical background of the research topic.This study analyzes existing research and proposes a framework that shows how pre-travel mental simulation affects tourist engagement during the on-site experience,subsequently impacting tourist experience satisfaction levels.The chapter also elaborates on the research content,research methods,technical pathway,and main innovations.Chapter 2 provides an overview of the concepts related to mental simulation,pre-travel mental activities,tourist engagement,and tourist experience satisfaction,including their connotations,dimensions,influencing factors,and effects,as discussed in previous studies.The chapter synthesizes and organizes relevant literature to refine the research questions to be examined in this study.Chapter 3 discusses the theoretical basis for how pre-travel mental simulation affects tourist engagement during on-site experiences and post-travel satisfaction evaluations.Building on this,the chapter proposes hypotheses related to how mental simulation impacts tourist experience satisfaction,how on-site tourist engagement mediates the relationship between mental simulation and tourist experience satisfaction,and how different types of tourism experiences moderate the impact of pre-travel mental simulation on tourist experience satisfaction.Chapter 4 presents the results of two field experiments aimed at collecting self-reported data on how pre-travel mental simulation affects tourist experience satisfaction.Various statistical methods,including confirmatory factor analyses,t-tests,and Process analysis,were used to test the relationships in the hypotheses.The findings of the study support the proposed hypotheses.Chapter 5 investigates the mediating effect of on-site tourist engagement on the relationship between pre-travel mental simulation and tourist experience satisfaction through eye-movement tracking experiments.The first fixation duration and total fixation duration of participants were used to represent the cognitive engagement levels of tourists during on-site experiences,while pupil size was used to represent their affective engagement levels.The results of the data analysis indicated that both cognitive and affective engagement acted as mediating factors between the two kinds of mental simulation and tourists’ experience satisfaction.Chapter 6 presents a summary of the hypothesis testing results,offers a detailed interpretation and discussion of the findings in light of existing literature,and underscores the theoretical contributions of this study.Furthermore,practical management recommendations for the tourism industry are suggested based on the research findings.The chapter also explores the limitations of this study and outlines potential directions for future research.The theoretical contributions of this study are mainly reflected in two aspects.Firstly,the tourism academic community has traditionally focused on the on-site and post-travel stages of the tourism experience while neglecting the pre-travel stage.In contrast,this study expands the perspective to include pre-travel mental simulation,and constructs a research framework consisting of “pre-travel mental simulation-on-site engagement-post-travel tourist experience satisfaction”.This enriches and extends the existing tourism experience theory system by considering the pre-travel stage as an integral part of the tourism experience.Secondly,while previous studies have confirmed that mental simulation can impact consumers’ purchase decision-making,willingness,or attitudes towards physical products,little attention has been paid to the impact of mental simulation on consumers’ post-purchase experience.This study examines the impact of mental simulation as an independent variable on subsequent tourism experiences,advancing and deepening the significance of mental simulation in consumer experiences from a novel research perspective.The findings of this study have two major practical implications for the tourism industry: Firstly,tourism enterprises should be aware that the period between consumers’ booking or purchasing of their tourism products and the actual trip is a valuable marketing window.During this period,presenting specific information to consumers and guiding them through corresponding mental simulations can have a positive impact on their subsequent tourism experiences.Secondly,tourism enterprises can benefit from using mental simulation strategies to increase the purchase intentions of potential consumers.Marketing managers should avoid solely emphasizing the uniqueness or value of the product in their marketing advertisements.Instead,they should design advertisements with open-ended statements that actively guide consumers to project themselves into the situations described in the advertisements.In addition,for cognitive tourism products such as museums,advertisements should focus on guiding consumers through the mental simulation of the specific experiential process.For hedonic tourism products such as amusement parks,advertisements should focus on guiding consumers through the mental simulation of the positive emotions they can derive from the experience.This study also has certain limitations.Firstly,the field experiment relied solely on self-report questionnaires to collect data.In the future,with the advancement of technology,the use of wearable eye-tracking devices could be introduced to measure tourists’ real-time eye movement data during actual experiences,which could effectively improve the internal validity of field experiments.Secondly,given that mental simulation has been validated by contemporary neuroscientists,future studies could consider using electroencephalogram(EEG)to measure mental simulation in laboratory studies.Integrating eye-movement tracking with EEG could enable a multi-modal approach that combines external subconscious behavior with internal neural patterns,thereby effectively improving the internal validity of laboratory studies.