Tour Game-Likeness and Immersive Tourism Experience: The Role of Arousal Need and Gamification

This study provides novel insights into immersive tourism experiences by analyzing the game-like qualities of tours. It introduces and measures new concepts of Tour Game-Likeness and a corresponding index to quantify the extent to which a tour resembles an ideal game. It identifies nine game-like components in tours and explores how the degree of game-likeness influences immersive tourism experience, while also examining the moderating effects of past travel experience and arousal need, drawing on gamification and arousal theories. These relationships were compared among three types of tours with three distinct gamification modes. Results reveal that these relationships vary across different tour types, highlighting that Tour Game-Likeness, visitors’ arousal needs, and a tour’s gamification mode collectively influence visitors’ immersive tourism experience. Tours can be gamified by incorporating game-like components, and, depending on visitors’ arousal needs, tour designers can employ either active or passive gamification strategies to enhance visitors’ immersive tourism experiences.