Abstract

Purpose: This study investigates how psychological distance embedded in transportation mode, social-distance cues, and cognitive-resource availability jointly shape consumers’ responses to framed promotional messages in mobile cross-border travel-booking environments. The research aims to clarify why loss-framed messages become persuasive in some travel contexts while gain-framed messages dominate in others. Research design, data and methodology: Three controlled experiments using mobile-booking scenarios were conducted. Study 1 (n = 193) examined how air versus ship travel interacts with framing; Study 2 (n = 268) incorporated social-distance cues between countries; Study 3 (n = 337) added cognitive-resource depletion to test whether the framing–distance match depends on effortful reasoning. Message attitudes or favorability, perceived distance, and construal levels were measured using validated procedures. The mediation analysis was conducted using multiple regression. Results: Air travel elicited psychological proximity, increasing the persuasiveness of loss-framed messages, whereas ship travel evoked distance, enhancing gain-framed messages. When temporal and social proximity aligned, loss framing became especially impactful, but when distance cues accumulated, gain framing consistently prevailed. Construal level mediated the effects, and cognitive depletion did not moderate them, indicating intuitive heuristic processing rather than resource-dependent reasoning. Conclusions: Transportation mode acts as a natural psychological-distance cue that shifts consumers’ construal and alters the effectiveness of message framing. Persuasion improves when framing aligns with contextual distance, offering practical implications for designing adaptive promotional strategies in mobile travel-booking environments.