Spirit is Contagious: How Blind-box Offerings Affect Tourist Responses in Spiritual Destinations

In recent years, spiritual destinations (temples, churches, and mosques) have increasingly adopted blind-box offerings—products or services with concealed attributes—to engage tourists. While prior research has explored the cognitive and affective appeal of tourism blind boxes, their role in spiritual tourism, and the unique ability to signal symbolic meanings remains understudied. Drawing on magical contagion theory and schema congruity theory, we propose that blind-box designs can amplify tourists’ perceptions of spiritual essence, particularly in sacred settings. Through field data from a Buddhist temple café (Study 1) and two online experiments (Studies 2 and 3), we demonstrate that blind-box (vs. certain) offerings heighten essence perception, driving purchase intent. Two boundary conditions—tourists’ religiosity and semantic framing (charitable purchase vs. donation-with-a-gift)—are examined to show when and why the blind-box design will be favored or disliked.