From Digitalization to Customer-Based Value in Tourism: The Mediating Role of Personalized Experience

Introduction: Digital investments in tourism create economic value only when they translate into customer-relevant outcomes. This study examines whether personalized tourism experience statistically mediates the association between perceived digitalization and behavioral loyalty intentions, conceptualized as retention-related indicators rather than direct measures of financial performance.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 419 Romanian adults who had recent post-pandemic travel experience. Participants were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling. Perceived digitalization, personalized tourism experience, and revisit intention and recommendation behavior were modeled as reflective latent constructs. Confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples were performed in AMOS.

Results: Perceived digitalization was positively associated with personalized tourism experience (β = 0.630, p < 0.001), which was positively associated with behavioral loyalty intentions (β = 0.485, p < 0.001). The conditional direct association between perceived digitalization and loyalty intentions remained significant (β = 0.228, p < 0.001). The standardized indirect effect was β = 0.305, 95% BC CI [0.221, 0.414], supporting partial mediation. The model explained 39.7% of the variance in personalization and 42.6% of the variance in loyalty intentions.

Conclusions: The findings indicate that digitalization is more strongly connected with customer-based value when tourists experience digital service processes as adaptive, relevant, and low effort. From a data-capitalization perspective, digital infrastructure alone appears insufficient; its retention-related value emerges through customer-perceived personalization across service touchpoints. The study does not estimate financial returns, actual repeat behavior, or causal effects.