Why Feeling a Destination Is Real Beats How Fun It Looks in VR

Virtual reality has quietly become one of the most persuasive tools in destination marketing, letting travelers walk through cities, temples, and coastlines they have never physically seen. A new study from Vietnam suggests that what convinces people to book a trip is not how dazzling the simulation looks, but whether they believe it faithfully represents the real place. The research, published in Discover Artificial Intelligence, analyzed responses from 699 Vietnamese participants who experienced a standardized VR tourism simulation before completing a detailed survey, and the findings point to a surprising hierarchy of psychological mechanisms.

The study was conducted by Duc Trung Nguyen and Van Dat Tran of Ho Chi Minh University of Banking, who set out to address a persistent gap in VR tourism research. Most existing models treat the psychological response to virtual experiences as a single, undifferentiated state, blending together concepts like presence, immersion, and flow. The Vietnamese team instead built an extended stimulus-organism-response framework that separates four distinct internal mechanisms: presence, perceived authenticity, emotional involvement, and enjoyment. They then examined how two experiential stimuli, vividness and interactivity, feed into these mechanisms, and how social signals from the surrounding environment moderate the relationship between internal states and the intention to actually visit.

Methodologically, the researchers used partial least squares structural equation modeling, a statistical approach suited to complex models with multiple mediating pathways and interaction terms. Each participant wore a Meta Quest 2 head-mounted display and explored a VR destination under identical procedural conditions before answering questions on a five-point scale. All constructs were modeled as reflective latent variables, and the measurement model showed strong internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.834 to 0.953 and average variance extracted between 0.750 and 0.876. No survey items were dropped during scale purification, which the authors highlight as important for measurement transparency.

The headline finding concerns perceived authenticity. Within the specified model, authenticity carried the largest coefficient linking internal states to visit intention at 0.502, well ahead of presence at 0.264, emotional involvement at 0.219, and enjoyment at 0.182. This suggests that when users judge a virtual destination as a credible and faithful representation of the real thing, that evaluative trust does more to drive travel intention than the sheer pleasure of the experience. Authenticity in this context is not merely visual realism; it draws on narrative consistency, cultural cues, and alignment with what users already expect from the destination.

On the stimulus side, interactivity outperformed vividness. The total indirect association with visit intention through the organismic layer reached 0.489 for interactivity compared with 0.346 for vividness. Interactivity’s largest component flowed through perceived authenticity at 0.236, followed by presence at 0.142. The pattern is consistent with the idea that agency matters: when users can navigate freely, adjust viewpoints, and shape their own journey rather than follow a scripted path, the destination feels both more credible and more experientially immediate. Vividness still contributed meaningfully, with its largest indirect component also running through authenticity at 0.148, but sensory richness alone appears less decisive than the ability to actively explore.

The model explained 57.9 percent of the variance in visit intention, a substantial figure for behavioral research. Yet the authors are unusually candid about the limits of their structural estimates. The estimated model showed weak global fit, with a standardized root mean square residual of 0.134 and a normed fit index of 0.768, both indicating meaningful misspecification. Every coefficient, ranking, and interaction sign is therefore presented as an exploratory estimate conditional on this particular parallel specification, not as a validated structural hierarchy that would necessarily hold under sequential or alternative model formulations.

Perhaps the most provocative result involves social signals, the cues that communicate others’ presence, endorsement, or engagement within the virtual environment. The lower-order association between social signal and visit intention was negative at minus 0.309, statistically significant and non-trivial. The authors offer a tentative interpretation grounded in psychological reactance theory: when popularity cues or externally supplied endorsement become conspicuous, users may perceive them as conformity pressure or commercial orchestration, which can undermine their sense of independent judgment and reduce baseline willingness to visit. In other words, heavy social signaling may backfire rather than persuade.

The interaction terms told a more nuanced story. Social signal amplified the effects of perceived authenticity and emotional involvement on visit intention, with positive coefficients of 0.120 and 0.102 respectively, while attenuating the effects of presence and enjoyment, with negative coefficients of minus 0.112 and minus 0.072. This asymmetric pattern is compatible with a social-validation substitution account: when normative cues become salient, users shift weight toward socially confirmable judgments like authenticity and meaningful emotional attachment, and away from private sensations like immersion or simple fun. However, the interaction effect sizes were small, ranging from 0.010 to 0.019 in f-squared terms, and the four product terms shared substantial variance, with two variance inflation factors approaching 5.0. The authors explicitly caution that coefficient redistribution remains a plausible alternative explanation for the sign pattern.

Descriptive simple-slope analysis reinforced this reweighting interpretation without showing any reversal. Across the range from one standard deviation below to one standard deviation above the mean of social signal, the fitted slope for presence declined from 0.376 to 0.152 and for enjoyment from 0.254 to 0.110, while the slope for authenticity rose from 0.382 to 0.622 and for emotional involvement from 0.117 to 0.321. All slopes remained positive, meaning social cues changed the relative importance of different psychological routes rather than flipping any of them negative. The authors stress that these are descriptive properties of the fitted model, not established moderator mechanisms.

For destination marketers and VR content developers, the practical implications are cautiously framed. The results suggest that investing in interactive features that let users explore autonomously may pay greater dividends than simply maximizing visual fidelity, and that building credible, culturally coherent narratives should be treated as a design hypothesis worth testing rather than a universal prescription. Social cues deserve equally careful handling: the fitted model hints that they reshape how users weigh their own experiences, but the exploratory nature of the estimates means no firm prescription against social endorsement can yet be made. The sample itself was predominantly female at 81.8 percent and drawn from VR-familiar Vietnamese users, so generalization to other populations, age groups, or markets requires replication. The dependent variable was stated intention rather than observed travel behavior, and all measures were self-reported immediately after the same exposure session, leaving open the possibility of residual common-method bias. Future research, the authors recommend, should preregister rival model comparisons, use balanced sampling with graded VR-familiarity measures, and collect temporally separated or behavioral outcomes to establish whether the patterns observed here survive more stringent tests.

Subject of Research: How virtual reality tourism experiences shape visit intention through presence, authenticity, emotion, and social signals

Article Title: Virtual reality’s impact on visit intention and the moderating role of social signal

Article References: Nguyen, D. T., & Tran, V. D. (2026). Virtual reality’s impact on visit intention and the moderating role of social signal. Discover Artificial Intelligence, 6(1), Article 1237. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-026-02270-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44163-026-02270-4

Keywords: virtual reality, tourism, visit intention, perceived authenticity, presence, interactivity, vividness, social signal, PLS-SEM, Vietnam, stimulus-organism-response, consumer behavior