Virtual influencers, real reservations: how do virtual influencers boost hotel bookings?

Purpose The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has raised an emerging trend of adopting virtual influencers (VIs) for hospitality promotions. This paper aims to investigate how VIs’ attributes affect consumers’ attitudes and purchase intention in hospitality marketing, and to further examine the mediating role of attitude toward VIs. Design/methodology/approach To achieve the proposed research objective, this study used PLS-SEM to analyze data from 302 participants collected from the online survey platform WJX. Findings All the identified VIs’ attributes (VI–brand congruence, authenticity, personalization, novelty and social presence) positively predict consumers’ attitudes and purchase intention. Attitude toward VI directly affects purchase intention and presents a significant mediation role between all the identified attributes and purchase intention. The findings will enable hospitality marketers to adopt VI marketing with effective strategies. Originality/value This paper extends the attitude-toward-the-ad model and the affect transfer hypothesis in predicting consumers’ attitudes and purchase intention in VI hospitality marketing. Moreover, this paper clarifies the effect of the identified factors and highlights the independent persuasive role of the VI.