Homogeneous or Heterogeneous? The Influence of Diverse Immersive Experiencescapes on Tourists’ Memorable Tourism Experiences

Abstract

Recently, an increasing number of tourism destinations have resorted to shaping immersive experiencescapes as a strategy to attract and retain tourists. Despite evidence that immersion can enhance experiences, there is insufficient analysis on whether and how tourists’ embodied interactions with diverse immersive experiencescapes generate differentiated memorable tourism experiences. Grounded in embodied cognition theory, this study examines the impact of diverse immersive experiencescapes on tourists’ memorable tourism experiences through a mixed-method design integrating the Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model with grounded theory. The findings indicate that tourists’ memorable tourism experiences exhibit significant heterogeneity across experiencescapes. These variations stem from distinct interactive elements within each experiencescape, especially the experience core and the experience carrier. Furthermore, this study proposes a progressive model of embodied immersion, illustrating how experiencescapes shape tourists’ memorable experiences. This research advances the theoretical understanding of immersive experiencescapes and embodied cognition while providing insights for optimizing destination experiencescapes.