Digital Engagement and Visitor Loyalty at Cultural Festivals: Evidence from Vilnius and Implications for Financial Sustainability

Cultural festivals increasingly depend on digital channels to reach audiences, which makes the allocation of limited promotional resources a recurring management problem. This study examines how digital engagement shapes visitor satisfaction and revisit intention at a cultural tourism event, using the Vilnius Pink Soup Festival as a case. Five factors (social media, public website quality, electronic word of mouth (eWOM), festival expectations, and ICT usability) are tested as predictors of visitor satisfaction and revisit intention. The decision to model visitor-level rather than adoption-level outcomes follows the human-centric premise of Industry 5.0, which motivates the choice of dependent variables but is not itself operationalized or tested. Five factors (social media, public website quality, electronic word of mouth (eWOM), festival expectations, and ICT usability) are tested as predictors of visitor satisfaction and revisit intention. A quantitative survey of 384 attendees was analyzed in IBM SPSS Statistics 29 by ordinary least squares regression on composite construct scores, with mediation tested through the PROCESS macro (Model 4) using 5000 bootstrap resamples. Four of the five factors significantly influence satisfaction, with festival expectations exerting the strongest effect, followed by social media, public website quality and electronic word of mouth; ICT usability was not significant once website quality was accounted for. Satisfaction did not mediate the relationships between these antecedents and revisit intention; with the antecedents controlled, they predicted revisit intention directly, explaining 57.5% of its variance. No ticket revenue, visitor expenditure, marketing expenditure or sponsorship income was collected, and no financial outcome is tested here. The findings are therefore reported as evidence on visitors’ response, and their financial relevance—which channels organizers might prioritize when allocating promotional budgets—is developed as a managerial implication rather than as an empirical result.