Interacting with digital humans: The effects of appearance and language style on tourists’ travel intentions

Digital humans have been increasingly adopted in the tourism industry to enhance consumer interaction. Drawing on anthropomorphism and congruence theory, this study investigates how two key design attributes—appearance (human-like vs. animated) and language style (rational vs. emotional)—influence tourists’ perceived competence of digital humans and their travel intentions. Using three experimental studies, the findings reveal that human-like appearances generally lead to higher travel intentions and that perceived competence mediates this relationship. Furthermore, a significant interaction effect is observed: human-like digital humans paired with rational language and animated digital humans paired with emotional language generate the most favorable outcomes. These results suggest that aligning visual and verbal cues enhances the effectiveness of digital humans. The study provides theoretical insight into the tourist–digital human interaction and offers practical guidance for tourism marketers to optimize digital human deployment.