Cultural heartstrings: how identity, authenticity, and spirituality weave the fabric of tourism loyalty: a case study of Naga myth landscape

Cultural tourism increasingly relies on emotional, identity-related, and spiritual mechanisms that traditional service-based loyalty models cannot adequately capture, particularly in mythological heritage settings. Applications of the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) paradigm rarely integrate identity and attachment perspectives, and individual spirituality as a boundary condition in cultural tourism loyalty remains underexplored. This study examined how cultural identity, cultural site attributes, content marketing, and spiritual elements shape revisit intention through an authentic tourist experience, emotional attachment, and destination image, with spirituality level as a moderator. Survey data from 404 domestic tourists at Naga myth landscape sites in Northeastern Thailand were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS–SEM). Emotional attachment was the dominant predictor of revisit intention (β = 0.605), exceeding destination image, with an authentic tourist experience serving as a central mediator. Cultural site attributes and spiritual elements were the strongest experiential antecedents, whereas content marketing primarily strengthened destination image. Spirituality level moderated the experience–attachment and elemental–attachment pathways differentially, amplifying the former while attenuating the latter. This study refines the S–O–R paradigm by introducing spirituality as a differentiated boundary condition and by integrating identity and attachment perspectives to better understand tourist behavior in emotion-led mythological heritage destinations.