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Introduction
Existing research reveals that casinos not only function as gambling venues, they are also major travel attractions beyond providing hardcore gambling (Wong and Rosenbaum, 2012). This social phenomenon has led to an increased interest not only in understanding the motivational and experiential appeals of non-gaming elements pertinent to casinos, but also in exploiting means to better promote casinos as “must go” leisure entertainment venues (Tsai et al., 2015). Casinos have been long stigmatized for inducing addictions and gang battles (Vong and Wong, 2013), which has given rise to the prohibition of gambling promotions in some regions. Such restriction has driven casino marketers to camouflage the property and refocus the place through social media as a leisure getaway haven that can engage tourists with endless joy and fun, hence legitimizing casinos (Wong et al., 2019). In fact, the practice of camouflaging gambling elements, such as slot machine visual or casino loyalty program, under the headlines of great food and leisure events has been common practice on new media platforms. However, little is known about its effectiveness, as detecting camouflage strategy is challenging (Venkateswaran et al., 2021).
For years, empirical evidence has identified the effectiveness of social media platforms in stimulating behaviors such as revisits, user attachment, electronic word of mouth and online purchases (Li et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2016; Wolny and Mueller, 2013; Huang et al., 2020a). While casino marketers have been adopting social media platforms to interact with visitors to stimulate visitation to their properties, much academic interest still underlines the visitor’s behavior in either the physical or cyber context (Buhalis and Wagner, 2013; Huang et al., 2021b). As the interaction between both environments has been rising and the boundary is blurring, there is an urgent need to understand the unidentified impact incurred in such process – the possibility of transition from social media platform to the physical setting.
According to the boundary crossing theory, individuals possess the ability to step into different domains despite obstacles (Engeström et al., 1995), with boundaries between different sites (Kim and Bramwell, 2019). As this process remains unclear in the casino context, the motivation, opportunity and ability (MOA) model is adopted to unravel relationships between visits to social...