Can red tourism lead to spiritual transformation? Evidence from tourists visiting the Red Army Long March Xiangjiang Battle Memorial Park

• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280920
• Publication Date: 2023-07-07T17:21:54Z
• Authors: Huiling Zhou; Qianru Zhang; Yajun Jiang; Fuyuan Wang
• Keywords: Sociology and Political Science; Science; FOS: Political science; Geography, Planning and Development; Social Sciences; FOS: Law; Immigration; Tourist Motivations; Social psychology; Structural equation modeling; Tourism; FOS: Economics and business; Tourism Research; Asian People; Sociology; Advertising; Surveys and Questionnaires; Halal Tourism and Consumer Behavior; FOS: Mathematics; Humans; Psychology; Business; Nationality; Political science; Marketing; Geography; Battle; Q; Religious Tourism; Statistics; R; FOS: Sociology; FOS: Psychology; Tourism and its Impact on Communities; Archaeology; Medicine; Perception; Spiritual Tourism; Law; Changing Geographies of Religion in Modernity; Mathematics; Research Article; Neuroscience

The mechanism of spiritual transformation in red tourism plays a key role in facilitating the inheritance of red culture. A survey of 385 tourists of Chinese nationality was conducted to explore the path of red tourism’s influence on tourists’ spiritual transformation. Based on the stimulus–organism–response theory, this paper explores tourists’ environmental perceptions of red tourism activities as special external stimuli, introduces a positive emotion factor, and constructs a path model of red tourism for tourists’ positive emotions based on educational function and cultural identity, which ultimately leads to their spiritual transformation. The results of the empirical tests using structural equation modelling indicated that environmental perceptions had a significantly positive effect on the stimulation of positive emotions, while positive emotions had an indirect effect on spiritual transformation. The research results enhance people’s understanding of the spiritual transformation brought by red tourism and provide management significance for red tourism planning.