From screens to seats: understanding tourist webrooming intentions with the mediating role of quest for food authenticity using SEM-ANN approach

The proliferation of food delivery applications and digital information sources has transformed how tourists select dining options. This study investigates tourists’ webrooming behavior – browsing online before dining offline – through the lens of the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework. Specifically, it examines how external stimuli (price consciousness, food neophobia, cultural experience, and promotion) influence webrooming intentions via the internal “quest for food authenticity.” Data were collected from a sample of 350 tourists in India who utilized online platforms for dining decisions. The study employs a dual-stage analytical approach, utilizing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to estimate the structural model and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) analysis to capture non-linear relationships. A core finding is that the “quest for food authenticity” fully mediates the influence of price consciousness, cultural experience, and promotion on webrooming intention. While food neophobia exhibited a partial mediation effect, the ANN analysis further ranked “cultural experience” as the most significant predictor of webrooming behavior, followed by promotion. These findings offer a theoretical contribution by validating authenticity as a goal-directed “organism” state and provide practical strategies for hospitality managers to leverage digital content for authentic engagement.