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This review aims to discuss concepts and theories from cognitive psychology, identifies tourism studies applying them and discusses key areas for future research. The paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive psychology for understanding why tourists and particularly pleasure travellers demonstrate the behaviour they exhibit.

The paper reviews 165 papers from the cognitive psychology and literature regarding pleasure travel related to consciousness, mindfulness, flow, retrospection, prospection, attention, schema and memory, feelings and emotions. The papers are chosen to demonstrate the state of the art of the literature and provide guidance on how these concepts are vital for further research.

The paper demonstrates that research has favoured a behaviourist rather than cognitive approach to the study of hedonic travel. Cognitive psychology can help to understand the mental processes connecting perception of stimuli with behaviour. Numerous examples are provided: top-down and bottom-up attention processes help to understand advertising effectiveness, theories of consciousness and memory processes help to distinguish between lived and recalled experience, cognitive appraisal theory predicts the emotion elicited based on a small number of appraisal dimensions such as surprise and goals, knowledge of the mental organisation of autobiographical memory and schema support understanding of destination image formation and change and the effect of storytelling on decision-making, reconstructive bias in prospection or retrospection about a holiday inform the study of pleasurable experience. These findings indicate need for further cognitive psychology research in tourism generally and studies of holiday travel experiences.

This review is limited to cognitive psychology and excludes psychoanalytic studies.

Cognitive psychology provides insight into key areas of practical importance. In general, the use of a cognitive approach allows further understanding of leisure tourists’ behaviour. The concept of attention is vital to understand destination advertising effectiveness, biases in memory process help to understand visitor satisfaction and experience design and so on. Use of cognitive psychology theory will lead to better practical outcomes for tourists seeking pleasurable experiences and destination managers.

This is the first review that examines the application of concepts from cognitive psychology to the study of leisure tourism in particular. The concepts studied are also applicable to study of travellers generally.

This study aims to explore some perceptions related to the suggestion that external auditors will be replaced by audit technologies that use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make audit judgements when performing the financial statement audits. Digital transformation is revitalising the technologies used by external auditors and their firms; thus, the authors seek to understand what challenges this creates for the auditing profession in Vietnam.

Through the theoretical lens of new institutionalism theory, this study uses a qualitative approach involving 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with external auditors in Vietnam during 2022. This sample includes the global Big Four, global mid-tier and smaller local Vietnamese audit firms.

The findings indicate that there is resistance or disagreement with the suggestion that in the future audit technologies using AI tools can replace humans (external auditors). The role of external auditors in the professional services sector will gradually be changed by audit technologies; however, external auditors are unlikely to be replaced by audit technologies that use AI tools based on the responses of the participants. Strict institutional rules that exist in Vietnam would prevent the replacement of (human) external auditors. In the future, external auditors may take on new roles as consultants, with unique skills in classifying and processing data for decision-making processes; however, they will not be completely replaced by technology in the audit space.

This study has limitations that it is based on the data collection from a single developing country, Vietnam; therefore, the generalisability of the findings is limited to Vietnam. Also, the authors sought insights into the future of external audits in Vietnam.

This study highlights the changing role of auditors and institutions. Thus, policymakers, external auditors and auditees in other developing countries would find the findings helpful.

This study provides new perspectives, particularly from local Vietnamese firms, about audit practices that emerge due to high-level technological advancements and then embed themselves into existing audit practices in an emerging economy. Prior studies tended to focus on the global Big Four firms, thus this study contributes by sharing the perceptions of the smaller practitioners also.

When making decisions about their future dream holidays, tourists often spend significant time thinking about future scenarios. This is an example of ‘mental time travel’, a process called prospection. The concept of prospection refers to human ability of ‘pre-experience’ the future and hence how that future ‘feels’, which is why it is sometimes called affective forecasting. There is a large volume of psychological research on prospection, but in applied fields, the use of various terms makes the current literature complex, disconnected and hard to navigate. This chapter provides an introduction to prospection as an underlying mechanism explaining some of the effects of experiential marketing. It discusses tourism prospection-related terms, errors of prospection and mental biases and ways to better manage tourist experiences.

Effective experience design requires not only a knowledge of tourist goals, but an understanding of how these can be met in a particular tourism site. Research on experiences and experience design is supported by cognitive psychology concepts such as perception, attention, appraisal, emotion, consciousness, feelings and memory. However, these concepts are often used in a combination with others from sociology, social or environmental psychology in a manner that leads to confusion rather than clarity, without apparent understanding of the theoretical mechanisms by which these concepts are related. This chapter develops a series of propositions for potential application to tourism experience design. Future research should examine the efficacy of these propositions from cognitive psychology for tourism experience design.

New information and communication technologies have transformed the ways businesses communicate and maintain relationships with their customers. In this chapter, we review the main topics in academic research pertaining to digital marketing and relationship perspectives. The discussion involves email and website marketing, search engine marketing, user-generated content, co-creation marketing, social media marketing, prosumption marketing in the sharing economy, immersive marketing and AI-based marketing. On this basis, the chapter proposes some future research directions including influencer marketing, live streaming, social service enhancement and the dark side of social media marketing, consumer-to-consumer interactions on two-sided platforms, psychological mechanisms related to the use of mixed realities, and the experience of AI-enabled service automation and relevant ethical issues. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT) and blockchain are expected to be the next breakthrough in marketing, which warrant further research to examine their impact on the customer-firm relationship. It is suggested the researchers could focus on the adoption and application of blockchain technology, participative marketing via IoT, as well as the privacy and data protection issues related to these technologies. This chapter provides a comprehensive picture of the connection between digital marketing and relationship marketing in academic research.

Digital technology has given rise to new economic models such as sharing economy and business structures such as omnichannel. Technological advancements also enable firms to build a one-on-one relationship with customers. This chapter covers the current business practices that involve the use of digital tools to develop and manage customer relationships. They are omnichannel marketing, user-generated content, interactive content, live videos – live streaming, co-creation marketing and influencers marketing. The chapter also identifies emerging trends pertinent to digital marketing and relationship development. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as virtual assistants and programmatic advertising are predicted to be at the heart of digital marketing in the near future. In addition, though still in the early stage of development, blockchain technology has the potential to improve the transparency of transactions and data protection, thereby increasing trust and relationship quality. The use of immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual realities are expected to gain significantly more popular in the next few years. Finally, these trends can be further facilitated by 5G, the fifth generation of mobile technology, heralding a new era of digital communication and transforming the customer experience.

This article traces the transformation of hát bội, a form of traditional opera in Southern Vietnam, from its primary role as entertainment into a religious activity after the Reform (Đổi Mới) were enacted in 1986.

This research is based on ethnological fieldwork complemented by a review of historical documents and of the available literature on hát bội, cultural policies and on data collected from interviews with artists and spectators at the festival at the shrine to the Lady of the Realm.

Before 1986, hát bội was performed either as a stand-alone entertainment during the fair portion of community festivals or as part of religious ceremonies. The Reform and the accompanying relaxation of state control over religion and culture promoted the resurgence of popular religious fairs across the nation. New opportunities for hát bội to revive opened, artists left state-sponsored troupes to join private companies that catered to religious festivals. But almost exclusive involvement in religious rites has led to artistic stasis for private hát bội troupes.

This research constitutes novel insights of how the Reform in Vietnam affects the transformation of a traditional performance form.