Virtual tourism destination ambassadors enhancing social media engagement: Technology mindfulness perspectives

Virtual influencers (VIs) have rapidly emerged as a compelling force in social media marketing. In the tourism context, this paper highlights the importance of virtual tourism destination ambassadors (VTDAs), which are different from VIs in control, core attributes, and long-term value orientation. Integrating technology mindfulness with technology affordance, this study aims to understand how characteristics of VTDAs, as their technology affordances, affect the potential tourists’ social media engagement and visit intention. Under the mixed methods approach, the first qualitative phase, conducted via semistructured interviews, confirms the necessity of VTDAs for destination promotion in the pretravel stage and explores five multidimensional technology affordances: customization, authenticity, interactivity, entertainment, and informativeness. Then, the quantitative phase tests the structural relationships and unveils that the multifaceted affordances of VTDAs, except interactivity, positively affect technology mindfulness, which further affects two different levels of social media engagement and visit intention. The Importance–Performance Map Analysis further reveals customization and authenticity as the prioritization of crucial characteristics of VTDAs. This study is the first to adopt and highlight the importance of VTDAs representing tourist destinations with both qualitative and quantitative evidence. Besides, this study confirms technology mindfulness in the context of VTDAs and integrates it with technology affordance to explain the mechanism behind social media engagement. This study provides practical implications for destination marketing organizations and stakeholders with insightful strategies for implementing VTDAs on social media.