Overtourism increasingly threatens resident wellbeing and destination sustainability. While existing research essentially prioritizes regulatory or infrastructural solutions, this study reconceptualizes marketing as a behavioral governance system, a coordinated mechanism of communication, technology, and policy that shapes tourist decision making toward sustainable outcomes. Drawing on a narrative review of 72 peer-reviewed studies published between 2017 and 2025, the analysis identifies 10 strategic categories, including demarketing, geographic diversification, digital engagement, brand repositioning, and visitor education. The study introduces two complementary models: (1) a diagnostic map that traces the evolution and distribution of marketing-based overtourism strategies and (2) a behavioral governance framework linking marketing interventions to cognitive and affective mechanisms—such as persuasion, emotional engagement, identity alignment, and norm activation—that influence tourist behavior. Findings show that marketing can produce temporal (when tourists travel), spatial (where they go), and experiential (how they engage) shifts that collectively strengthen destination resilience and sustainability. By consolidating dispersed insights into a unified behavioral perspective, the study clarifies marketing's role as a governance tool. It provides a foundation for more effective, evidence-based approaches to sustainable destination management.

This study explores the impact of tourists’ viewing frequency of travel reality shows on willingness to travel through cultivation theory and uses & gratification theory, along with a pilot study and three scenario-based experiments. Results indicate that viewers with high (vs. low) viewing frequency of travel reality shows evoke greater willingness to travel, further testing the serial mediating effect between destination image and perceived destination attractiveness. Additionally, this study reveals the moderating role of tourists’ likability of travel reality shows. The findings not only broaden the application of these theories in travel reality show-induced tourism but also provide practical insights for destination marketers.

As tourism firms increasingly adopt sustainable practices, effectively communicating their sustainable transitions has become essential yet challenging. This study explores how tourism operators use narrative structures and framings to communicate their sustainable transitions and their tensions to audiences on Instagram. Employing a comparative case study approach, this research analysed 2320 Instagram posts (from 2019 to 2024) and semi-structured interviews with three tourism operators in New Zealand. Findings indicate that tourism operators use ‘Romance’ and ‘The Quest’ narratives to engage consumers in sustainability dialogues. However, firms differ significantly in how they frame tensions, ranging from explicit acknowledgement to implicit or absent representation. Instagram's interactive and multimodal nature enables viewers to ignore, endorse, or contest firms’ sustainability narratives and to surface tensions in sustainability. This active engagement challenges assumptions that tensions in sustainability are too complex for public audiences to grasp. This study advances the literature on sustainability communication in tourism by highlighting how narrative complexity and audience interaction shape how tourism firms’ sustainability narratives are crafted, offering practical insights for effectively communicating sustainable transitions on social media platforms.

While retouched photos on social media have been argued to be at best inauthentic and at worst fake, this study employs a negotiated authenticity lens in combination with aesthetics theory to investigate how social media audiences perceive the authenticity, including antecedents and consequences, of retouched travel photos, using an online survey. Findings show that in the context of retouched travel photos, perceived constructive authenticity, perceived existential authenticity ascribed by social media audiences, and perceived creative authenticity derived from tourists’ rationale for posting are significantly associated with social media audiences’ perceptions of the authenticity of these photos. This positively associates with perceived aesthetics and in turn, predicts impulse travel intention. Notably, this study demonstrates that social media audiences actively and critically engage in the attribution of authenticity. These findings offer valuable theoretical contributions and provide useful practical implications for tourism providers to plan and design tourism products and marketing collateral.

This study contributes to the literature on authenticity in tourism by examining its psychological foundations through the lens of identity orientations. It explores the structural relationships between identity orientations, perceived authenticity, experience quality, collective effervescence, and tourist satisfaction in the context of scuba-diving tourism. Data collected from tourists visiting Kaş, a major scuba-diving destination in Antalya, Türkiye, were analyzed using Bayesian SEM. The results reveal that identity orientations positively influence perceived authenticity, which in turn, perceived authenticity positively affects experience quality and collective effervescence. Notably, these two constructs fully mediate the effect of perceived authenticity on satisfaction, positioning authenticity as a psychological catalyst. The results imply important inferences regarding the identity and authenticity debates in tourism, and besides, introduce the effervescence concept as a useful intermediary.

Digital humans have been increasingly adopted in the tourism industry to enhance consumer interaction. Drawing on anthropomorphism and congruence theory, this study investigates how two key design attributes—appearance (human-like vs. animated) and language style (rational vs. emotional)—influence tourists’ perceived competence of digital humans and their travel intentions. Using three experimental studies, the findings reveal that human-like appearances generally lead to higher travel intentions and that perceived competence mediates this relationship. Furthermore, a significant interaction effect is observed: human-like digital humans paired with rational language and animated digital humans paired with emotional language generate the most favorable outcomes. These results suggest that aligning visual and verbal cues enhances the effectiveness of digital humans. The study provides theoretical insight into the tourist–digital human interaction and offers practical guidance for tourism marketers to optimize digital human deployment.

E-sports hotels are one of the fastest-growing sectors within the “e-sports + X” model, yet academic research on this setting remains limited, and little is known about the environments that best support repeat consumption. Drawing on recreationist–environment fit theory, this study uses polynomial regression and response surface analysis to examine, from a bilateral fit perspective, how the alignment between environmental attributes and consumer expectations shapes repurchase intention. Using two-wave survey data from 280 participants, the results show that high levels of fit significantly enhance flow experience and reduce psychological alienation. Under low-fit conditions, a high-environment–low-expectations pattern generates more flow experience and reduces psychological alienation more effectively than the opposite pattern. In addition, flow experience and psychological alienation mediate the relationship between fit and repurchase intention. These findings underscore the pivotal role of consumer–environment fit in fostering repurchase intention in e-sports hotels and provide theoretical and practical guidance for optimizing hotel environments to support sustainable industry development.

With natural disasters becoming more frequent and severe, understanding how religion shapes tourist risk perception and travel intentions is vital for destination recovery and resilience. Religion remains a critical yet often overlooked factor in tourist behavior, especially in Asian destinations where religious norms strongly influence decision-making. This study investigates the role of religion and religiosity on the risk perception, self-efficacy, and travel intention of domestic tourists in two disaster-prone destinations, Padang, Indonesia and Beppu, Japan that lie on the “Ring of Fire.” The study employs a mixed method approach using pre-survey in-depth interview with tourism and religious leaders, a quantitative survey ( n = 486) questionnaires, and follow-up qualitative interviews with eight religious and community leaders. The quantitative survey data were analyzed using structural equation modeling using Smart PLS 3, and the interview transcripts were analyzed using manual content analysis. The findings indicate that the religion and religiosity of domestic travelers from Indonesia and Japan have an important but complex effect on intention to travel and perceived risks. On one hand, despite the destination perceived risky, religion and religiosity may enhance confidence to travel to a destination where a disaster has occurred, due to a belief in God's protection. On the other, belief in ghosts is more common in Asia and this affects destination perception and hence post disaster recovery marketing. This study is important for destination managers in tailoring multifaith destination marketing communication in disaster-prone destination to avoid a tourism downturn.

How to make tourism advertisements memorable in information overload? Based on narrative transportation theory, this study conducts four experiments to examine the relationship between chronological narrative and memory effect, and finds the following: (1) Tourism advertisement videos with presence (vs absence) chronological narrative significantly enhance memory effect; (2) Perceived temporal salience mediates the relationship between chronological narratives and memory effects; (3) The memory enhancing effect of chronological narrative was contingent upon two independent moderators: Popular voice-over and picture-in-picture unrelated to attractions. Both moderators weakened the memory benefits of chronological advertisements but enhanced recall in the absence of chronological narrative. From the perspective of enhancing users’ cognitive coherence, this study enriches the literature on tourism advertising narratives and memory, expands the research scope of their underlying mechanisms, and provides practical insights for optimizing tourism destination marketing strategies.

Low-altitude tourism is emerging as an innovative form of travel enabled by new aviation technologies and policy support, yet its consumer adoption remains underexplored. This study integrates the Extended Norm Activation Model and the Emotion-Driven Behavior Model to examine how value-based drivers shape motivation and behavioral intention. A two-stage SEM-ANN analysis was conducted with 355 respondents in China. Results show that outcome expectancy, environmental moral awareness, and perceived self-efficacy strengthen consumer attitudes, while only outcome expectancy and moral awareness directly enhance desire. Both attitude and desire significantly predict intention. Unexpectedly, perceived safety risk reinforces rather than weakens these effects, suggesting that risk can serve as a motivator in hedonic or novel tourism contexts. ANN analysis further identifies desire and self-efficacy as the most influential predictors. The findings contribute to theory on risk-sensitive adoption while offering marketing implications for positioning low-altitude tourism as an exciting, sustainable, and emotionally engaging experience.