Digitally Constructed Expectations and Symbolic Competitiveness in Generation Z Ecotourism

บทคัดย่อ

This study examines how immersive digital technologies and social media narratives shape satisfaction, behavioural intention, and perceived destination competitiveness among Generation Z ecotourists. Moving beyond infrastructure-centric approaches, the study adopts a perception-based lens to interrogate how tourism experiences are constructed through digitally mediated narratives prior to physical engagement. A qualitative interpretive design was employed using semi-structured narrative interviews with five Generation Z travellers in Malaysia. Data were analysed through thematic analysis, capturing cognitive, affective, and behavioural dimensions of digitally constructed experiences. The findings reveal that social media platforms, particularly TikTok and Instagram, function as primary agents of anticipatory experience formation, in which aesthetic storytelling, peer validation, and experiential cues shape both expectations and evaluative judgements. The study identifies a digitally constructed expectation gap, whereby imagined standards derived from user-generated content exceed or reconfigure experiential interpretation without reliance on objective verification. This gap reframes destination competitiveness as a symbolic construct, shaped through visibility, narrative circulation, and digital engagement rather than infrastructural readiness. The study contributes to the ecotourism and digital tourism literature by demonstrating that competitiveness is increasingly mediated through narrative ecosystems, in which tourists operate simultaneously as consumers and co-producers of destination meaning. These findings highlight the need for destination stakeholders to engage critically with digital storytelling dynamics to align expectation formation with sustainable tourism development.