How immersive experiences carry over across the customer journey: A two-stage study of virtual reality in heritage tourism

Despite growing interest in virtual reality (VR) in heritage tourism contexts, empirical evidence on its value beyond single-use applications across the customer journey remains limited. This research examines the effectiveness of VR across the visit and post-visit stages of the tourism customer journey and their interrelated effects across successive stages. Grounded in the integrative stimulus–organism–response framework, the study adopts a two-stage design. In the first stage, the on-site experience of actual museum visitors during exposure to VR is examined using a multimethod approach combining physiological arousal measures with self-reported data. In the post-visit stage, conducted one week after the visit, the same participants are exposed to communication content related to their prior visit, delivered either through VR or a smartphone display in a between-subject design, and their intention to recommend the museum is measured. Results show that VR-mediated post-visit communication is associated with a stronger intention to recommend the destination than smartphone-based media, with presence mediating the relationship between communication modality and recommendation intention. The memorability of the on-site VR experience significantly moderates the relationship between post-visit presence and recommendation intention, such that the positive effect of presence decreases as memorability increases. This suggests that recommendation intention one week after the visit is associated with both the immediate immersive stimulus and experiential traces accumulated during prior on-site interactions, supporting the view of the customer journey as an interconnected experiential process. The findings offer destination managers practical guidance for using VR to encourage post-visit recommendations of heritage tourism sites.