From sustainable marketing to sustainable travel intention: Moral, experiential and cognitive pathways

This study examines how destination-level sustainable marketing activities (SMA) influence tourists' sustainable travel intentions through moral, experiential, and cognitive mechanisms. Rather than relying solely on attitudinal explanations, this study integrates personal social responsibility (PSR), perceived novelty, and sustainable intelligence (SI) into a unified psychological framework to explain how tourists internalize sustainability communication. Drawing on the Norm Activation Model and Optimal Stimulation Level theory, this study develops and empirically tests a structural model using survey data from 317 tourists in Vietnam. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was employed to assess both measurement and structural models. The findings indicate that perceived SMA significantly enhances tourists' PSR and perceived novelty but does not directly influence SI. Instead, SI is shaped primarily by PSR and perceived novelty and emerges as the strongest explanatory driver of sustainable travel intention within the tested structural model. Perceived novelty plays a dual role by directly enhancing both SI and travel intention while weakening the relationship between SMA and SI at high levels, suggesting a boundary condition associated with excessive experiential stimulation. This study advances sustainable tourism literature by conceptualizing perceived SMA as a destination-level, visitor-side construct and by integrating moral, experiential, and cognitive pathways into a unified explanatory framework. By identifying SI as a strong explanatory mechanism rather than a robust out-of-sample predictive construct, the findings provide a psychologically grounded explanation of how tourists internalize sustainability communication and translate it into sustainable travel intentions, offering actionable insights for designing more effective destination sustainability marketing strategies.