The impact and mechanism of culture mixing on travel intention

Although culture plays an essential role in destination image creation, few studies have examined the effectiveness of culture mixing in the tourism industry. Thus, we tested the impact of culture mixing on travel intention with a sample of 279 tourists in China. Results revealed a distributional effect of cultural iconicity on culture mixing, which suggests that tourists preferred culture mixing and showed a strong travel intention, but only for destinations with a low level of cultural iconicity. In contrast, they expressed a negative response to culture mixing when the destination had high cultural iconicity. Additionally, we examined the mediating roles of confusion experience and creativity perception to further strengthen understanding of culture mixing in the tourism context. Our findings provide insight into how to build creative tourism destination environments and advise prestigious destinations on how to utilize cultural tactics in advertising.