Cultural Creative Design and Virtual Technology in Digital Cultural Tourism: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Digital cultural tourism refers to an emerging field that integrates cultural heritage, creative content, and immersive technology. It is increasingly influenced by both cultural creative design and virtual technology. Yet, existing reseARch tends to examine content-related design factors and immersive technology factors in isolation, which leaves the mechanism of tourist satisfaction formation insufficiently explained. This article develops an integrated conceptual framework to bring these two sides together. It focuses on two research domains, cultural creative design and virtual technology, and keeps five design-related factors and three virtual technology factors within them. Rather than reducing these domains to higher-order variables, the article keeps the eight factors analytically separate while showing how they work together. Their combined influence is expressed through tourist cultural experience, which serves as the key mediating mechanism linking external inputs to tourist satisfaction. This experience is defined as holistic cognitive, emotional, and sensory engagement with cultural meaning. From this perspective, tourist satisfaction in digital cultural tourism is shaped not by design or technology alone, but by the meaningful interaction between cultural expression, experiential design, and immersive technological support. By integrating fragmented literature and centering the mediating role of tourist cultural experience, this study articulates novel theoretical contributions to digital cultural tourism and experience research while also offering practical insights for destination management, cultural interpretation, and tourism innovation.