When Visuals Meet People with Disabilities: How Destination Image Featuring Disability Drives Travel Intention?

Abstract

This research investigates how featuring people with disabilities in tourism destination images on social media shapes viewers’ travel intention. Guided by warm glow theory, a mixed-methods approach was employed, comprising a field study, semi-structured interviews, and five online experiments. The findings demonstrate that including people with disabilities in tourism destination images has a significant positive effect on travel intention. Moreover, the results show that cognitive mechanisms involving self-projection, affective mechanisms involving emotional empathy, and inferential mechanisms involving perceived destination social responsibility function as parallel processes linking trust in disability-inclusive destination images to enhanced travel intention. This research contributes to the tourism literature by theoretically explaining and empirically examining the effects of disability-inclusive destination images on travel intention and their underlying psychological mechanisms.