Psychological Appraisals of AI Tourism Recommendations: Procedural Justice, Perceived Autonomy, and Tourist Trust

ABSTRACT This study develops a dual‐path model to examine how explainability, transparency, and user controllability are associated with trust in AI‐powered tourism recommendations through procedural justice and perceived autonomy. AI literacy is further examined as a moderator of the relationships between the three recommendation characteristics and the two psychological variables. The results show that explainability, transparency, and user controllability are positively associated with both procedural justice and perceived autonomy. Transparency has the largest estimated association with procedural justice, whereas user controllability has the strongest estimated association with perceived autonomy. Both psychological variables are positively associated with trust and provide significant indirect pathways between the three recommendation characteristics and trust, indicating partial mediation. AI literacy positively moderates all six associations, with consistently steeper positive slopes among respondents reporting higher AI literacy. These findings distinguish procedural fairness evaluation from decision autonomy as two complementary psychological pathways related to tourist trust.