Abstract

Tourism studies continue to highlight the significant role of paradigms of digital consumer behaviour in framing destination competitiveness, but few studies have ventured into examining their application in niche markets of agro-tourism such as cocoa-based destinations. Being a significant producer of cocoa, Indonesia provides a pertinent opportunity for blending cocoa farms and tourism and supporting sustainability, rural development, and rural livelihoods. Against this backdrop, the AISAS model (Attention, Interest, Search, Action, Share) has stood out strongly as conceptual framework of examining digital tourist decision-making, but its integration of Tourist Citizenship Behaviour (TCB) remains under-examined. Filling this gap, this paper expands AISAS by TCB and applies it to examining tourists' behavioural processes under cocoa tourism, paying special attention to pro-social action elements of advocacy, respect of culture, and engagement of sustainability deepening digital decision processes. Studied through 239 participants' survey data, structural equation modelling (SEM) acts the research study empirically confirming the framework of AISAS–TCB. Our work verifies the sequence of AISAS stages and determines TCB as key antecedent influencing attention, interest, search, and sharing behaviours, and hence positions it as catalyst and amplifier of sustainable engagement respectively. From a theoretical perspective, this paper enriches the extant work of digital tourism by situating cocoa tourism as new proving ground of paradigms of consumer behaviour. From a practical perspective, it offers policymakers, managers of destinations, and farming communities of cocoa production actionable policies of blending digital engagement and sustainably-sensitive tourism initiatives.

Keywords

AISAS Model, Consumer Behaviour, Destination Marketing, Sustainable Tourism, Cocoa Tourism,

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References

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