When Visuals Meet People with Disabilities: How Destination Image Featuring Disability Drives Travel Intention?

Vollständiger Abstract

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This research investigates how featuring people with disabilities in tourism destination images on social media shapes viewers’ travel intention. Guided by warm glow theory, a mixed-methods approach was employed, comprising a field study, semi-structured interviews, and five online experiments. The findings demonstrate that including people with disabilities in tourism destination images has a significant positive effect on travel intention. Moreover, the results show that cognitive mechanisms involving self-projection, affective mechanisms involving emotional empathy, and inferential mechanisms involving perceived destination social responsibility function as parallel processes linking trust in disability-inclusive destination images to enhanced travel intention. This research contributes to the tourism literature by theoretically explaining and empirically examining the effects of disability-inclusive destination images on travel intention and their underlying psychological mechanisms.