Travel live streaming and tourist decision-making: Bridging virtual engagement and physical travel

Can watching a destination live stream actually get someone on a plane — or does it satisfy curiosity so completely that the trip never happens? This study examines how travel live streaming (TLS) shapes tourist decision-making, integrating the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) with affordance theory to move past the theoretical fragmentation that has produced contradictory findings about whether TLS motivates, substitutes for, or suppresses physical travel.

How the research was done

The authors took an interpretivist, theory-building approach, conducting semi-structured Zoom interviews with 27 participants (aged 19–54) in August 2024. Using purposive and snowball sampling, they recruited viewers who had watched TLS and subsequently visited a featured destination — predominantly Chinese users of platforms like Ctrip and Douyin. Analysis followed a directed content analysis design that combined deductive codes drawn from TPB and affordance theory with inductive themes emerging from participants’ narratives, supplemented by platform analytics and member checking. China serves as the study context as the world’s largest live-streaming market, where streaming, e-commerce, social validation, and instant booking converge in single “super-platform” ecosystems.

What the research found

Five themes emerged. Immersive and discovery affordances shape attitudes — but in a dual-edged way: the same vivid, repeatable content that inspires travel can also produce substitution and saturation, so attitudes become ambivalent rather than unidirectional. Subjective norms are restructured into multilayered, simultaneous validation from hosts, online communities, and personal networks that viewers actively co-create. Affordances for cost-free immersion, real-time guidance, and transparency strengthen perceived behavioural control over financial, logistical, and safety barriers — sometimes enabling travel, sometimes enabling substitution. Psychological commitment surfaces as the affective “glue” that bridges intention and behaviour, arising from sustained engagement with authentic content. Finally, authenticity, commercialisation, and sustainability tensions can moderate or override otherwise positive attitudes, with perceived commercial bias quickly dissolving trust.

Insights for the industry

For destination marketers and platforms, the practical message is to treat authenticity and transparency as strategic assets: signal sponsorship clearly, foreground community-centred storytelling, and resist over-commercialisation that erodes credibility. TLS can be used to spotlight lesser-known sites and redistribute visitor flows, provided exposure is calibrated to avoid overtourism and inflated expectations — since mismatches between the stream and the real visit drive disappointment and negative word-of-mouth. Integrated strategies that pair immersive content with well-designed e-commerce and interactive guidance can support both short-term conversion and longer-term loyalty, while platform governance that protects privacy and encourages community benefit-sharing keeps TLS aligned with sustainable tourism goals.