The advent of short video apps like Douyin has greatly popularized the practice of sharing travel experiences in the form of live-streaming or prerecorded videos. With the breakout of COVID-19, the feasibility and appeal of physical travel were substantially undermined such that people now become increasingly dependent on watching short videos as a means of consuming travel-related content. This revolutionary change in the landscape of destination marketing is reshaping the tourism industry, which calls for research efforts of both scholars and practitioners. Our study aimed to investigate how two major characteristics of tourism-themed short videos, namely, level of novelty and camera angle, influence viewers' behavioral intentions toward actually visiting the places, with the incorporation of several relevant psychological mediators, including immersion, positive surprise, spatial presence, and perceptual realism. A 2 (low- vs. high-level novelty) × 2 (first- vs. third-person view) factorial experiment was designed and conducted. Statistical analysis based on a sample of 480 participants suggested that the perception of positive surprise increased with the level of novelty contained in the videos, which was positively associated with viewers' visit intentions in an indirect manner. Moreover, compared to the third-person view, employing the first-person view to film sites and scenes produced a greater sense of immersion, which in turn stimulated interest in taking a tour. This study contributes to the growing body of research in digital travel and telepresence.
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