How tourism experiences relate to eWOM intention: the roles of self-expansion and place attachment in ancient town tourism.

Why are certain tourism experiences more strongly associated with tourists' self-expansion, place attachment, and destination advocacy than others? Drawing on self-expansion theory, this study examines the psychological processes through which experiential consumption in ancient town tourism is associated with electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) intention. Integrating the experience economy framework, self-expansion theory, place attachment theory, and the stimulus-organism-response framework, we propose that tourism experiences are associated with eWOM intention indirectly through self-expansion and place attachment. Survey data were collected from 410 tourists who had recently visited representative ancient towns in the Jiangnan region of China and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that educational, entertainment, and escapist experiences are positively associated with self-expansion, whereas aesthetic experience is not significantly associated with self-expansion. In addition, self-expansion is positively associated with both place dependence and place identity, and both dimensions of place attachment are positively associated with eWOM intention. Bootstrapping analyses further support significant indirect associations between several tourism experience dimensions and eWOM intention through self-expansion and place attachment. These findings extend previous tourism research by providing additional evidence that self-expansion is associated with tourists' place-related attachment and online advocacy. More broadly, the findings contribute to personality and social psychology by suggesting that tourism experiences are associated with self-concept enrichment and place-related identity, which may be reflected in online advocacy as a form of identity expression.