Generative AI or Human Creativity? How Travel Guide Creators Shape Tourists’ Decision-Making Through Cognitive and Emotional Mechanisms

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming tourism information creation by enabling AI systems to generate travel recommendations and destination narratives. However, limited research has examined whether AI-generated and human-created travel guides influence tourists’ decision-making through distinct psychological mechanisms. Drawing upon source credibility theory and the stimulus–organism–response framework, this study develops a cognitive–emotional framework to investigate how travel guide creators shape tourists’ decision-making and when AI-generated tourism content is more likely to be accepted. A pre-study and three experimental studies were conducted with 300 participants across two tourism contexts, including the Mount Tai Scenic Area and Shanghai Disneyland. The results demonstrate that the effectiveness of travel guide creators depends on destination characteristics, with a significant interaction effect between creator type and destination type (F(1,296)=14.56, p<0.001). Further analyses reveal that AI-generated travel guides influence tourists’ decision-making through information credibility (β=0.41, p<0.001), whereas human-created travel guides operate through perceived authenticity (β=0.29, p<0.001). Moreover, AI literacy strengthens the relationship between AI-generated travel guides and information credibility (β=0.18, p<0.01), enhancing the cognitive pathway through which AI-generated content affects tourists’ decisions. These findings extend generative AI research in tourism beyond technology adoption by demonstrating that AI and human creators generate complementary value through distinct cognitive and emotional mechanisms.