From Personalization to Loyalty: How Generative AI Shapes Tourist Brand Loyalty Through Transparency and Trust in Smart Tourism Platforms

This study investigates the impact of generative AI personalization on brand loyalty within smart tourism platforms and examines the mediating roles of perceived transparency and consumer trust. As generative AI technologies become increasingly integrated into tourism services, understanding the mechanisms through which personalized AI-driven interactions influence tourists’ loyalty has become an important research priority. Drawing upon the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) framework, the study proposes that generative AI personalization is associated with brand loyalty both directly and indirectly through tourists’ evaluations of transparency and trust. A quantitative research design was adopted using a structured questionnaire administered to tourists with prior experience using generative AI-enabled smart tourism platforms. A total of 688 valid responses were collected and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings reveal that generative AI personalization is positively associated with brand loyalty, perceived transparency, and consumer trust. The proposed model explained 76.5% of the variance in brand loyalty (R2 = 0.765), with consumer trust emerging as the strongest direct predictor of loyalty (β = 0.379). Furthermore, both perceived transparency and consumer trust significantly mediated the relationship between generative AI personalization and brand loyalty, indicating that tourists’ evaluations of platform transparency and trustworthiness play important roles in linking personalized AI experiences with long-term loyalty intentions. The study contributes theoretically by extending the application of the S-O-R framework to generative AI-enabled tourism environments. Specifically, it conceptualizes generative AI personalization as an adaptive technological stimulus and demonstrates how perceived transparency and consumer trust function as key cognitive mechanisms linking AI-driven personalization to brand loyalty. The findings also provide practical insights for tourism organizations seeking to leverage generative AI technologies to strengthen customer relationships and foster long-term loyalty within smart tourism platforms.