From Platform-Mediated Visual Cues to Travel Intention: Emotional Appeal and Configurational Pathways in Internet-Famous Cities

In internet-famous cities, tourists often see a place first through short videos, social media images, influencer posts, and user-generated content. These platform-mediated visual cues guide their attention, evaluation, and destination imagination. A city may begin to appear attractive, credible, or meaningful before direct contact. Emotional appeal and travel intention can also begin to form at this stage. The stimulus–organism–response framework structures the model: landscape aesthetics, media authenticity, and symbolic value serve as visual stimuli; emotional appeal represents the internal affective state; travel intention serves as the behavioral response. Survey data were collected from 449 Chinese domestic tourists who had visited one of eight internet-famous cities. Structural equation modeling tested the cue–emotion–intention mechanism. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis identified cue combinations linked to high and low travel intention. The results show positive effects of landscape aesthetics, media authenticity, and symbolic value on emotional appeal and travel intention. Emotional appeal partly mediates these relationships. Symbolic value shows the strongest effect on travel intention. The configurational results reveal three pathways to high travel intention: media authenticity with emotional appeal, symbolic value with emotional appeal, and the joint presence of landscape aesthetics, media authenticity, and symbolic value. Low travel intention is mainly linked to the joint absence of all four conditions. The findings show that platform-mediated visual cues do not work through one route only. They influence travel intention through direct cue effects and cue–emotion configurations.