Digital Tourism Commerce: Do Multisensory Mental Imagery and Imagined Presence Explain Consumers’ Purchase Intentions?

Digital tourism increasingly relies on technology-enhanced visuals to shape consumer decision-making, yet most digital destination communication remains predominantly visual, limiting the multisensory richness of pre-consumption experiences. This study investigates, theoretically and empirically, how multisensory mental imagery (MI), imagined presence (IP), and purchase intention (PI) are related in digital tourism commerce, and whether visually embedded sensory metaphors can activate MI, strengthen IP, and be associated with higher PI in online tourism contexts. In a within-subject online experiment (n = 903), participants viewed, in a fixed order, a conventional destination visual followed by an AI-generated image augmented with cues suggestive of smell, taste, and touch, for two destination types (an exotic leisure destination and an urban city-break destination). For the exotic destination, sensory-enriched visuals were associated with small but reliable gains in perceived vividness, IP, and PI (dz = 0.11–0.13, Holm-corrected); for the city-break destination, only PI increased (dz = 0.09). Sense-specific imagery ratings rose markedly in both contexts, with gustatory and olfactory imagery emerging as the most responsive dimensions. Mediation analyses showed that IP is the strongest pathway linking MI to behavioral motivation, consistent with a sequential experiential mechanism that connects sensory design to consumer intention formation. Importantly, even subtle visual elements were sufficient to evoke sensory anticipation without requiring immersive technologies such as AR or VR. These findings advance research on digital tourism commerce, sensory marketing, and technology-mediated consumer behavior by showing that multisensory cues can be systematically embedded into static visuals to enrich experiential meaning. In practical terms, the results offer guidance for designing more engaging digital touchpoints that foster sensory imagination and support consumer decision-making in competitive online environments, with the caveat that the study measured PI rather than actual purchases.