Marketing low-altitude tourism: How value-based drivers and safety risk shape consumer adoption

Low-altitude tourism is emerging as an innovative form of travel enabled by new aviation technologies and policy support, yet its consumer adoption remains underexplored. This study integrates the Extended Norm Activation Model and the Emotion-Driven Behavior Model to examine how value-based drivers shape motivation and behavioral intention. A two-stage SEM-ANN analysis was conducted with 355 respondents in China. Results show that outcome expectancy, environmental moral awareness, and perceived self-efficacy strengthen consumer attitudes, while only outcome expectancy and moral awareness directly enhance desire. Both attitude and desire significantly predict intention. Unexpectedly, perceived safety risk reinforces rather than weakens these effects, suggesting that risk can serve as a motivator in hedonic or novel tourism contexts. ANN analysis further identifies desire and self-efficacy as the most influential predictors. The findings contribute to theory on risk-sensitive adoption while offering marketing implications for positioning low-altitude tourism as an exciting, sustainable, and emotionally engaging experience.