Virtual reality and tourism marketing: conceptualizing a framework on presence, emotion, and intention

In a post-COVID landscape, building interest and evoking positive emotions toward tourism products are vital for destination recovery. As a result, interest and opportunity for the use of immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) for tourism marketing has intensified. Despite the ubiquity of presence as a concept in VR research, exploring and adapting presence for tourism marketing remains in infancy. In particular, there is still limited understanding of the importance and interplay of the determinants of presence. Through a critical review of presence research in ICT, education, psychology, psychiatry, marketing, and tourism, this paper establishes a comprehensive conceptual framework (named PEI framework) encompassing the determinants (immersion, engagement, sensory fidelity) and consequences of presence (P) on emotional response (E) and behavioural intention (I). This paper also found that presence research remains a disparate body of work. Frameworks and measures from which to bridge disciplines and contexts remain nascent. The interplay between presence determinants and their effects on emotional response, shown to be context-dependant in this review of presence VR research, has yet to be tested or theorized in tourism research. Suggestions for advancing the framework, both context and method-wise, are made for future VR research.