Gazing at the Gazers: An Investigation of Travel Advertisement Modality Interference

Abstract

Tourists are often exposed to imagery of a destination through advertisement modalities such as texts and pictures before they visit the place. This research used an eye-tracking technique to examine the effect of spatial and modality configurations on tourist destination advertisement attention and travel intention. Drawing on multiple resource theory and based on two 4 (spatial displacement) × 3 (modality) experiments, results reveal that spatial location and modality have an impact on tourist attention with respect to their dwell time and fixation counts, which lead to greater propensity to visit a place. In addition, tourists paid more attention to advertisements that occupy congruent attentional resources than to those using interference resources.