Drawing on the authentic happiness theory, this study proposes a model that links audience involvement, hedonic happiness, eudaimonic happiness and travel intention to better understand how travel vlogs stimulate online users to travel offline. The model conceptualizes three dimensions of audience involvement, namely narrative involvement, media personae identification, and parasocial interaction, based on the social characteristics of travel vlogs. Data collected from 454 participants were used to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that (1) travel vlog audiences members’ authentic happiness has a hierarchical structure, with narrative involvement, media personae identification, and parasocial interaction all having a positive and significant impact on hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness; (2) narrative involvement and media personae identification have a stronger impact on hedonic happiness, while parasocial interaction has a stronger impact on eudaimonic happiness; (3) hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness fully mediate the impact of narrative involvement, media personae identification and parasocial interaction on travel intention. This study enriches the literature on audience involvement and deepens the theoretical understanding of authentic happiness in the context of tourism social media. It also provides guidance to tourism destinations on how to engage in vlog marketing. •Audience involvement is broken down into three dimensions.•Travel vlog viewers' authentic happiness has a hierarchical structure.•Audience involvement has a positive impact on hedonic and eudaimonic happiness.•The impact of audience involvement on two types of happiness is asymmetric.•The mediating effects of hedonic and eudaimonic happiness are examined.