Cognitive‐Affective‐Behavioral Themes in Post‐Purchase Attitudes Toward Virtual Tourism Experiences: A Mixed‐Method Approach

ABSTRACT Virtual tourism experiences (VTEs) have grown rapidly after COVID and are expected to grow further. Customer attitudes toward VTEs are therefore of interest. Attitude, in general, is known to have three components: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. Thematic details of attitudes toward VTEs have not yet been explored, motivating the current study. We use a mixed‐method approach to explore latent themes within online reviews for VTEs. Latent Dirichlet allocation, used for topic modeling, is applied to 58,675 reviews from Airbnb online experiences. Next, we analyze 70 online reviews from Viator using thematic analysis. The primary themes that emerge are host appreciation , recommendation , hedonic experience , interactive aspects , social connections , and culture and learning . We discuss in detail how these themes relate to the tri‐component model of attitude. Our study of post‐purchase consumer attitudes provides new insights into the design, delivery, and marketing of VTEs which has academic as well as managerial implications.