Heritage and its effects on the tourist destination image: A comparison of architectural styles

This research highlights the importance of understanding and measuring visitors’ emotional and cognitive experiences and responses to different architectural styles present in and affecting TDI. It provides a novel perspective by integrating virtual reality and neuromarketing techniques to explore the interplay between architectural heritage, emotional responses, and cognitive processes in tourism. The research focuses on four Spanish destinations: Trujillo, Albarracín, Cáceres, and Besalú, examining the impact of heritage on visitors’ brain responses. An experiment was conducted in a controlled laboratory environment using virtual reality (VR) videos to simulate visits to the selected tourist destinations. Neuromarketing techniques, specifically electroencephalography (EEG), were employed to measure participants’ alpha and beta brain waves, associated with emotional and cognitive responses. The study revealed significant effects of architectural heritage on emotional and cognitive responses and the formation of the tourist destination image. Notably, cognitive responses and destination image formation varied significantly between different heritage assets. However, no significant differences in emotional responses were observed across different architectural styles. This lack of variation is attributed to the presence of quarry stone in architecture, which homogenised the emotional stimulus and suggests avenues for future research. The insights gained can guide tourism managers in designing and promoting heritage sites to enhance emotional and cognitive engagement with visitors. Also, understanding the impact of different architectural heritage on visitor perceptions can contribute to the preservation and appreciation of cultural landmarks, fostering cultural tourism and heritage conservation. Further and future research could compare architectural styles with greater differentiation and detail, real tourists with in-lab individuals, and lab-experiment outputs with field-experiment outputs to gain insights into the specific neural mechanisms involved using advanced imaging techniques like fMRI alongside EEG to uncover detailed brain activations related to heritage architecture.