Content is Fire and Virtual Reality is Gasoline: Understanding Users Attention, Comprehension, and Attitude in Destination Promotion

Virtual Reality (VR) has become an emerging technology that benefits the tourism industry by promoting destinations through content stimulation and interactive feature. Extant research overlooks understanding the effect of content stimulation and modality interactivity on persuasive outcomes: attention, comprehension, and visit intention. Hereby, this research tries to uncover this effect by conducting a randomized lab experiment with 14 undergraduate students from the information system department. Observing recall and recognition memory, we extend this study by understanding how repetition might influence individual cognition. This study found that respondents can recognize and recall more information in interactive VR, and repetition does not influence this outcome, as indicated by an inverted U-shaped graph. It also shows that users have more attention to the museum collections through interactive features with less intention to visit the destination. This study provides novel insights for practitioners and service scholars in utilizing VR features to promote tourism services.