Food vlogger to vendor: how digital influence and culinary experience drive street food repurchase intention. Evident from heritage tourism destinations

Purpose This study advances understanding of digitally mediated gastronomic behaviour by examining how food vloggers shape tourists’ repurchase intention toward street food through the dual mediating mechanisms of parasocial interaction and past culinary experience within the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S–O–R) framework in heritage tourism. Design/methodology/approach Employing a quantitative, cross-sectional design, data were collected from 374 domestic tourists in Melaka, a heritage tourism destination, using purposive sampling. Structural relationships and mediation effects were examined via PLS-SEM (SmartPLS), assessing measurement validity, reliability and predictive relevance. Findings Food vloggers exert a significant influence on repurchase intention, both directly and indirectly through parasocial interaction and past culinary experience, confirming partial mediation. Parasocial interaction strengthens affective attachment and trust, while past culinary experience reinforces cognitive recall and evaluative judgement, demonstrating that behavioural intention emerges through multi-layered psychological processing rather than stimulus alone. Research limitations/implications The findings offer actionable strategies for local vendors, destination marketers and food vloggers to convert digital influence into sustained repurchase behaviour, including archiving vlogger content as owned media, designing campaigns that activate relational and experiential pathways together and structuring serialised content to build cumulative trust, with relevance for policymakers safeguarding authenticity in digital heritage tourism. Originality/value This study makes a significant theoretical contribution by synthesising influencer marketing, parasocial interaction and experiential memory within an integrated S–O–R framework. By evidencing a dual-path mediation mechanism, it reconceptualizes internal consumer states as multidimensional and co-constructed, offering a more nuanced explanation of digitally mediated gastronomic decision-making in heritage tourism.