To understand or to touch? Evoking tourists’ cultural preservation commitment through heritage tourism interpretation

Facing the cultural challenges and risks of global heritage tourism development, it is urgent to stimulate tourists’ cultural preservation commitment (TCPC). Therefore, this study delves into the connections between factual and affective content of heritage tourism interpretation and TCPC, as well as the intermediary role of experience quality and the moderating role of message framing, across three sub-studies. Study 1 applies big data and content analysis to preliminarily examine these connections. Studies 2 and 3 conduct scenario experiments to further verify their causality and examine how experience quality and message framing affect this relationship. Findings demonstrate that affective content is more potent in eliciting TCPC, with experience quality as a crucial intermediary. Furthermore, message framing (gain and loss) moderates TCPC formation, and combining gain framing and affective content is more influential. Under loss framing, this impact is not significantly different. This study expands the research scope and method of heritage tourism interpretation, and diversifies the discussion of TCPC antecedents. Moreover, the research uncovers experience quality’s intermediary role and message framing’s moderating effect in forging TCPC. The findings better evoke TCPC via interpretation tools, thus enhancing heritage preservation and sustainable tourism.