From Smart Tourism Encounters to Smart Tourism Experience: A Cognitive–Affective Formation Mechanism for International Tourists in Ethnic Destinations
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Abstract
Smart tourism research has established associations among technological attributes, experience evaluations, satisfaction, and behavioural intentions, but attribute–outcome and scale-based approaches leave the generative boundary between information access, cultural understanding, and experiential integration under-specified. This conceptual article addresses that formation–evaluation gap for international tourists who are culturally unfamiliar with ethnic destinations. It develops a context-bounded mechanism through a nested architecture in which no perspective is sufficient alone: the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework identifies structural positions but not the transformations between them; Service-Dominant Logic explains actor-led resource mobilisation but not why interpretive engagement is sustained; and Cognitive Evaluation Theory explains the motivational gate without specifying what is culturally understood. Their nesting is therefore necessary to connect encounter conditions, resource mobilisation, motivated interpretation, and provisional experiential integration. The mechanism links situated resource alignment, contextual interpretive transformation, cognitive–affective feedback, and provisional experiential integration. Negative or ambivalent affect can stimulate reinterpretation when interpretive support is sufficient and lead to simplification, avoidance, or overload when demands exceed available resources. Six propositions specify the conditions that shape formation, interruption, and cross-stage reconfiguration. Using Xijiang Qianhu Miao Village as an illustrative boundary context, the framework offers a gated and recursive middle-range account of how smart tourism experience forms, fragments, and changes over time.
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