Psychological profiles of mindfulness and tourist fatigue: a latent profile analysis in a digital travel context

The study examined how the different psychological constructs of mindfulness, anxiety, and positive fantasy engagement influence tourist fatigue in digitally mediated tourism experiences. In response to the increasing anxiety regarding cognitive overload in AI-driven travel ecosystems, the study reconceptualizes fatigue as configuration-dependent, but not uniformly experienced. Composite measures of mindfulness (MAAS), anxiety (GAD-7), positive fantasy engagement, and tourist fatigue were determined using survey data of 646 tourists. Latent Profile Analysis was used to identify psychological subgroups, after which ANOVA and multinomial logistic regression were run to test the differences in fatigue and demographic predictors. It is a framework that combines self-control theory, conservation of resources theory, and broaden-and-build theory in the digitally accelerated tourism context. There were four different types of profiles of mindfulness-dominated positive fantasy, emotionally distressed, high-positive psychological capital, and balanced-average. The profiles had a significant difference in fatigue levels (η² = 0.254), with the highest fatigue reported by the Emotionally Distressed group and the lowest by the High Positive Psychological Capital group. Mostly, the demographic predictors were insignificant, which emphasized the importance of psychological configuration rather than the structural characteristics. The findings advance tourism psychology by showing that fatigue is a result of the interaction between attentional regulation, emotional load, imaginative engagement, and the intensity of the digital environment. The study will add a multi-level psychological architecture of tourist fatigue by combining person-centered modeling with digital tourism scholarship. In the context of smart tourism system in China and AI-mediated traveling systems that continue to grow worldwide, the application of digital mindfulness and attentional scaffolding systems within platform design can potentially help reduce the fatigue of psychologically vulnerable users. This work goes beyond variable-based models to uncover the interaction of internal regulatory systems, tourism infrastructures that are mediated by digital technologies, to provide a worldwide applicable model of maintaining experiential well-being as technologically enhanced travel environments are experienced.