The Impact of Experience in Service Virtualization on Travel Intention - The Case of Forbidden City Tour

The advent of Internet and home shopping economy in the recent years has reduced the intention of people to leave home for sightseeing. This has significantly impacted the growth of physical tourism industry. This paper utilizes the virtual tour of Forbidden City to conduct a sequence of experiments in tourism experience. Before using the system, Theory of Planned Behavior and Involvement are employed to measure the intention of traveling. After then, two constructs, emotion and system, are adopted to explore how the experiential value of virtual tourism impacts the intention of travelling. The experience of tour virtualization allows customers to create unforgettable feelings in the virtual world. It can affect not only the customer’s experiential value of virtual tourism, but also intention of traveling in the future