The Effect of Destination Promotional Video on Destination Image, Tourists’ Risk Perception, and Travel Intention

The central target of marketing managers is always to create a positive attitude in tourist’s mind by employing multiple methods (e.g., brochures, stories, and promotional narrative videos) as a means to market and advertise a travel destinations and to mold a strong image that persuade travelers to visit a particular attraction (Rozier & Santos, 2011). Marketing via stories and promotional videos considered to be a valuable technique for marketing companies (Avraham & Daugherty, 2012). Tourism companies often offer tourists a short narratives in form of written story or video to capture tourists’ attention, trigger their interest, create positive image, and induce tourists to visit travel destinations. The techniques of storytelling employed in narratives play a part in image formation by transporting the viewers to imaginary world and break all stereotypes they already have in their minds, reduce perceived risk, and promote visit intention (Appel & Richter, 2010). By having this background in mind, this study aims to investigate the relationship between destination image, tourists’ risk perception, and intention to visit in the context of narrative transportation theory. Our results revealed that there is a linear positive relationship between narrative transportation and cognitive image and visit intention, so that when participants’ degree of transportation goes up, perceived cognitive image of the destination and visit intention goes up as well and participants consider destination image more positively. However, the results indicated that there is a negative linear relationship between narrative transportation and travel risk perception. As degree of narrative transportation increase, the level of perceived risk decrease and people consider the destination less risky. Therefore a promotional video employed by DMOs can change tourists’ perception of the destination, form a positive image, and reduce tourists’ perceived risk and as a result increase the number of potential tourists who are considering destination visitation.