Is One-Way Multi-Station Feasible? Influence of Value and Cost on Travel Intention of Urban Agglomeration in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area

Abstract

Regional tourism with urban agglomeration as the spatial carrier has become one of the flow characteristics of many tourists. Tourists visiting multiple cities at one time will certainly gain more value than visiting one city, but they will also pay more costs, thus affecting their emotions and willingness to travel. But the mechanism and theoretical boundaries have not been clarified. Based on the cognitive–affective–behavioral attitude model and the customer-delivered-value model, this paper takes the tourism destination tourists of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area urban agglomeration as samples to explore the influence mechanism of tourists’ perceived functional value, social value and knowledge value on positive emotion and travel intention, and to test the moderating mediating effect of monetary cost, energy cost and psychological cost on positive emotion. Social value and knowledge value positively affect travel intention. Functional value, knowledge value and social value positively affect positive emotion, and positive emotion positively affect travel intention. Positive emotion plays a complete mediating role between functional value, social value and travel intention, and plays a partial mediating role between knowledge value and travel intention. Monetary cost, energy cost and psychological cost respectively moderate the mediating effect of positive emotion between functional value and travel intention. Psychological cost moderates the mediating effect of positive emotion between social value and travel intention. Monetary cost and psychological cost respectively moderate the mediating effect of positive emotion between knowledge value and travel intention. Differences in the impact of consumers’ perceived value at different levels on positive emotion and travel intentions. It opens up the differences in the effects of the interaction of different levels of perceived value and different types of perceived cost on positive emotion. From an empirical point of view, it is proved that the tourism boutique line design based on multicity destination combination in China is feasible as a method to promote tourism integration and regional tourism brand building. It also puts forward the management enlightenment of regional tourism integration and regional tourism brand building from the perspectives of enterprises, front-line service personnel, residents and government.