When technology meets heritage: a moderated mediation of immersive technology on the constraint-satisfaction relationship

Cultural heritage represents the precious treasures of humanity. Understanding potential constraints and applicability of burgeoning technology become vital for cultural heritage conservation and tourism development. This study proposes a research model based on the leisure constraints theory vis-à-vis cultural heritage tourism. The model is tested by an on-site visitor survey from 495 tourists in the Mogao Grottoes, a well-known cultural heritage site in China. Results from two-step partial least squares structural equation modelling suggest that both interpersonal and structural constraints negatively influence tourists’ satisfaction. The study further divided tourists’ conservation behaviour into low- and high-effort ones, revealing that satisfaction has a higher level of impact on high-effort behaviour. Moreover, interpersonal and structural constraints negatively affect visitors’ heritage conservation behaviour via satisfaction, and these indirect effects of structural constraints are further moderated by the content quality of immersive technology. In other words, immersive technologies could alleviate the negative effects of constraints on tourist experience in the cultural heritage site. Findings provide critical implications for theory and practice.