The Impact of Generative AI Content Disclosure on Consumer Engagement and Visit Intentions in Tourism: A Content Analysis and Experimental Study

The growing popularity of Generative AI, together with its user-friendliness, is responsible for its extensive acceptance in several study disciplines. The utilisation of this technology in creating content for social media handles is used in several industries. Given the recent changes in legislation concerning the disclosure of genAI content, it is essential to investigate the impact of such disclosure on consumer behaviour. Our study explores the effects of disclosure on the intention to visit a tourist destination. First, we conducted a content analysis by extracting 1001 posts from Instagram, of which 501 were genAI content and 500 were human-created content. We aim to check the engagement on these posts. Second, we experiment with disclosure as an independent variable and visit intention as a dependent variable. We also check the mediating role of perceived information quality. Our findings indicate that despite having economic benefits for the brands, the engagement for genAI content is lower when compared to that of human-created content. Also, the intention to visit is lower for posts with disclosure of genAI content.