Impulse buying in travel live streaming: A deep learning-based dual-stage PLS-SEM-ANN analysis

Travel live streaming has gained in popularity in recent years and has become a crucial element of the tourism sector in certain countries. The phenomenon is, however, underexplored in the tourism and hospitality field. This study explores the role of information quality and destination attractiveness in shaping consumers’ cognition assimilation and travel inspiration arousal, and how these in turn promote impulsive buying behavior when watching travel live streams. PLS-SEM-ANN was used to analyze data collected from 459 respondents of an online questionnaire. The findings showed that information completeness, information accuracy, and destination aesthetic value significantly influenced cognitive assimilation, while destination reputation, destination novelty, and destination aesthetic value all significantly influenced travel inspiration arousal. Furthermore, the results of the artificial neural network analysis indicated that travel inspiration arousal had the greatest predictive power in terms of impulsive buying, while destination aesthetic value had the greatest impact on cognitive assimilation and travel inspiration arousal. This research provides valuable marketing insights for tourism e-commerce and deepens the understanding of the consumers’ impulsive buying behavior driven by cognition and emotion during travel live streaming.