Digital Travel As An Alternative To Physical Travel – An Analysis of Personal Traits and Vicarious Sense of Place Evoked By A Computer Game

Who is interested in digital travel? In particular, what are the personal traits of individuals that use digital alternatives to physical travel? The ob-jective of this follow-up paper was to develop more accurate answers to these questions. Our earlier work had shown that two characteristics dis-tinguish people who are positive to digital travel vs. those that are not: op-timism, as measured with the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, and resistance to peer influence, measured with the Steinberger and Monahan RIP-questionnaire. The first study took place during the Covid-19 pandemic – a time with travel restrictions. To expand on our findings in the first study, we commissioned a new, larger, national survey with 604 travellers to ana-lyse whether these two characteristics can be used to identify those with a positive view of digital travel. In both studies we asked our participants to judge digital travel based on specific questions about museums, attractions, and guided tours. In the current study, resistance to peer influence was pre-dictive of the likelihood of users accepting digital travel technologies but user optimism was not.