How technology-enhanced experience affects festival host destination attitude and word-of-mouth? Evidence from Taiwan

This study explores the technology-enhanced tourist experience in a festival context to address destination attitude and word-of-mouth towards a destination. Drawing specifically from the cognitive -affective-behavioural framework, we propose and empirically examine a model that integrates perceived novelty, as the cognitive component. Joy, and positive surprise were treated as the affective antecedents of memorable tourism experience. Memorable tourism experience was treated as the affective component, and attitude towards the destination and word-of-mouth were treated as the behavioural component. Data were collected from 265 visitors who attended the 2019 Taiwan Lantern Festival, which innovatively employed advanced drone technology to create an unprecedented visitor experience. Our results indicate that perceived novelty is positively related with joy and positive surprise, and all three are further positively related with memorable tourism experiences. Memorable tourism experiences demonstrate positive spill-over effects of festival experience on attitudes and word-of-mouth towards the host destination. Our results confirm the value of novelty gained from the technology-enhanced tourist experience, the critical role of positive surprise as the key emotional antecedent to memorable tourism experiences and the spill-over effects of festival experience.