Inner tourism marketing as the next frontier: reframing transformation, meaning, and humanity in the future of tourism

This study introduces inner tourism marketing as a mechanism-based framework that repositions marketing from influencing behaviour to enabling inner-oriented tourism experiences. Drawing on tourism and marketing literature, the study integrates established constructs, authenticity, storytelling, and trust-intimacy, into a structured process model explaining how experiences facilitate reflection, meaning-making, and transformation. The framework specifies a sequential chain of mediators (psychological safety, narrative resonance, intentional stillness, and guided self-reflection) and context-sensitive moderators (inner readiness, cultural fit, and technological mediation), making the model analytically explicit and empirically testable. The study contributes by (1) extending tourism marketing toward inner experience enablement, (2) opening the ‘black box’ of transformative experience through a mechanism-based architecture, and (3) functionally reorienting marketing design as an integrated system of experiential conditions. Practically, inner tourism marketing offers guidance for designing tourism experiences that foster deeper engagement, well-being, and sustainable behavioural change.