Too busy to rush: Recovery needs, travel pace, and heritage conservation willingness

Contemporary urban professionals face unprecedented levels of busyness—persistent work demands, cognitive overload, and chronic time scarcity—that fundamentally reshape how they approach leisure and travel. However, how this pervasive condition translates into specific tourism behavioural orientations, and whether it ultimately influences destination stewardship, remains theoretically underdeveloped. Drawing on Conservation of Resources theory, Attention Restoration Theory, and Person-Environment Fit Theory, this study proposes and tests a multi-stage model in which busyness shapes tourists’ travel pace preferences through the mediating role of need for recovery, which in turn predicts conservation willingness toward cultural heritage architecture—a relationship further contingent on the architectural qualities of heritage destinations. Using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) applied to survey data from 799 urban professional tourists in Vietnam who had visited cultural heritage sites, the results reveal that busyness is significantly and positively associated with preferences for slow-paced travel and negatively associated with preferences for fast-paced travel, with need for recovery partially mediating both relationships. Need for recovery is directly and positively associated with conservation willingness, and all relationships remain robust after controlling for gender, age, education, income, and travel frequency. Critically, architectural characteristics and aesthetics significantly moderate the recovery-to-conservation pathway, with aesthetic qualities producing a stronger amplification effect. Simple slope analyses confirm that the conservation-enabling effect of recovery needs is significant only when architectural qualities are high. These findings advance tourism scholarship by establishing busyness as a cross-domain antecedent of travel behaviour, extending Conservation of Resources theory beyond single-context applications, and identifying the environmental conditions that convert recovery-seeking tourists into active heritage conservation supporters. Practical implications are drawn for tourism market segmentation, slow-tourism product design, and heritage-site management strategies.