Advances in Hospitality and Leisure

Joseph S. Chen

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787434882
• eBook ISBN: 9781787435384
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Advances in Hospitality and Leisure delivers refreshing insights from a host of scientific studies in the domains of hospitality, leisure and tourism. It provides a platform to galvanize thoughts on contemporary issues and merging trends essential to theory advancement as well as professional practices from a global perspective. The focus is to transcend the innovative methods of inquiry so as to inspire new research topics that are vital and have been in large neglected. All volumes are keen to address the needs of the populace having interests in disseminating ideas, concepts and theories derived from scholarly investigations. Potential readers may retrieve useful texts to outline new research agendas, suggest viable topics for a dissertation work, and augment the knowledge of the subjects of interest.

FULL PAPERS

THE EMOTIONAL TRAVELER: HAPPINESS AND ENGAGEMENT AS PREDICTORS OF BEHAVIORAL INTENTIONS AMONG TOURISTS IN NORTHERN NORWAY

Joar Vittersø, Nina K. Prebensen, Audun Hetland and Tove Dahl

ABSTRACT

Recent theories on emotion suggest that a limited set of core feelings are the cornerstone of subjective experiences. The article proposes to bring this perspective more deeply into the study of tourist experiences and behavioral intentions. It argues that two distinct categories of positive feelings are of particular importance when analyzing the experiences of travelers. The first category reflects feelings such as happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction. The second category reflects feelings such as engagement, interest, and absorption. With questionnaire data from 505 visitors to two popular sites in Northern Norway, the current study investigated the degree to which visitors’ on-site feelings of happiness and engagement predict intentions to revisit to, or recommend to others, the destination. Results showed that engagement, but not happiness, predicted the visitors’ intention to revisit. Engagement further predicted intentions to recommend the site to others. Feelings of on-site happiness also predicted recommendation intentions. The implications of the theoretical perspective and empirical results presented in the article are discussed.

Keywords: Tourist experience; positive emotions; feelings; eudaimonia; hedonia; behavioral intentions; Norway

INTRODUCTION

Feelings are the centerpiece of subjective experiences (Denton, 2005; Lambie & Marcel, 2002; Panksepp & Biven, 2012). Even though researchers have noticed the importance of the emotional dimension of tourist experience, and quite a few studies have been done to explore the influence of emotions on tourist attitudes and behaviors (e.g., Hosany & Gilbert, 2010; Lee, 2014; White & Scandale, 2005), yet the concept of different feeling states and their subsequent effects are somewhat understudied in the tourism literature.

Emotions are delineated to explain individual’s reactions to events; they are suitable to acknowledge tourists’ experiences (Mitas, Yarnal, Adams, & Ram, 2012; Mitas, Yarnal, & Chick, 2012) and to predict future intentions to repeat the journey (Bigné & Andreu, 2004; Bigné, Andreu, & Gnoth, 2005). Consequently, even if the literature reveals a clear interest in tourist experiences, the focus seems not primarily to be on experiences defined as feeling states. Hence, the first goal of the present study is conceptual – devoted to clarify some of the relations between experiences and emotional feelings. The second goal is empirical – to offer data on the association between emotional feelings and behavioral intentions.

The Concept of Experiences

Despite the importance placed on experiences in the research on travelling (Holbrook, 2000; Larsen, 2007; Pine & Gilmore, 1999; Uriely, 2005), a common understanding of the concept “tourist experience” remains to be established. For example, a recent literature review summarized more than 20 different approaches to tourist experiences (Vespestad & Lindberg, 2011). The approaches reviewed in Vespestad and Lindberg’s study spanned a variety of meanings, from considering tourist experiences to be a meeting between consumption and production, to the idea that tourist experiences reflect the dislocation of the self from everyday life toward the extraordinary.

True enough, the term “experience” may have different meanings in the scientific literature, like when it refers to knowledge or skills that an individual accumulates over time. Nonetheless, in the sense of subjective or conscious experience, the term is typically given a more restricted meaning. Recent progress in the study of emotions (Damasio, 2010; Humphrey, 2002; Panksepp & Biven, 2012) makes it likely to believe that our conscious experiences are rooted in ancient subcortical regions of mammalian brains, and that they can be classified according to a limited set of basic neurological feeling systems. We don’t yet know how many distinct feeling systems exist and the issue continues to be debated – see for example Russell, Rosenberg, and Lewis (2011) and other contributions in this special section of the Emotion Review. But it seems fair to assume that humans have somewhere between five and ten basic emotional systems, sometimes referred to as basic feeling systems or basic affective systems.

Knowledge about the way in which biological structures regulate experiences is useful to the social sciences. Within the domain of subjective experiences, such knowledge feeds the important, although tedious, work of making a sensible and commonly agreed accepted taxonomy of the emotions that humans feel in their everyday lives. This is, of course, highly relevant in studies of tourist experiences as well. As pointed out by leading philosophers of science, conceptual improvements are probably the most important kind of progress science can make (Kagan, 2007; Mayr, 1982; Thagard, 2012).

Happiness and Engagement

The current study submits to the idea that happiness and engagement are prototypical examples of two important categories of positive emotions. In the emotion literature these categories are known under different names; some refer to them as liking and wanting (Berridge, 2003), as consumatory and appetitive (Burgdorf & Panksepp, 2006), as positive affect related to post- and pre-goal attainment (Davidson, 1998), or as hedonic and eudaimonic feeling states, as proposed in the functional well-being approach (FWA; Vittersø, 2013, 2016).

In the FWA, the argument of distinguishing two forms of positive feelings borrows strongly from the idea that the most fundamental task of all biological organism is to regulate both stability and change (e.g., Law & Staudinger, 2016; Piaget, 1981). Given the big difference between the process of maintaining stability and that of facilitating change, it is considered unlikely that evolution has equipped humans with only one mechanism to assist in the management of these fundamental principles. Hence, in order to account for the experiential part of regulating stability and change, the FWA proposes to distinguish between happiness (or hedonic) and engagement (or eudaimonic) as basic categories of positive feelings.

Hedonic feelings, such as happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction, are involved in the maintenance of stability. They operate by signaling to the organism that a need has been fulfilled or that a goal has been accomplished. Hedonic feelings are also frequently experienced during behavior that is familiar or easily managed. Following Piaget (1981), such behaviors operate in a mode of assimilation.

Eudaimonic feelings, such as interest, immersion, and engagement, are typically felt during the pursuit of important goals and in attempts to overcome obstacles. Such efforts cover a broad range of activities and include the struggle to learn a difficult skill and explore unknown territories. In the framework of Piaget, such behaviors operate in a mode of accommodation (Vittersø, Søholt, Hetland, Thorsen, & Røysamb, 2010). According to Panksepp, the eudaimonic feelings (or feelings produced by the SEEKING system in his vocabulary) allow animals “to search for, find, and acquire all of the resources that are needed for survival. Arousal of this SEEKING system produces all kinds of approach behaviors, but it also feels good in a special way. It is not the kind of pleasure we experience while eating a fine meal, or the satisfaction we feel afterwards. Rather it provides the kind of excited, euphoric anticipation that occurs when we look forward to eating the meal” (Panksepp & Biven, 2012, p. 95).

The distinction between happiness/hedonic and engagement/eudaimonic can be recognized in several taxonomies of tourist experiences. For example, Otto and Ritchie (1996) developed an experience quality scale, in which hedonics and involvement comprised two of the four factors of subjective experiences. In this context, involvement is a part of the hedonic feeling category.

After reviewing a series of attempts of defining and measuring tourist experiences, Kim, Ritchie, and McCormick (2012) proposed that the phenomenon could be conceptualized by seven dimensions: hedonism, refreshment, local culture, meaningfulness, knowledge, novelty, and involvement. Hedonism and involvement in the Kim et al.’s terminology correspond roughly to happiness and engagement in the taxonomy proposed by the FWA.

Behavioral Intention

Studies of vacationer’s motivation to revisit or recommend a destination are of growing importance (Assaker, Vinzi, & O’Connor, 2011; Chen & Chen, 2010; Kim et al., 2012; Mohammad, 2014; Wu, Li, & Li, 2014). Initially dominated by the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005) new models and refined understandings are currently developing in tourism research. For example, Yoon and Uysal (2005) pointed out that not only attitudes, norms, and perceived control (which are the basic elements of planned behavior), but also travel experiences and service quality are important predictors for intentions to revisit a site. Assaker and coworkers found that novelty seeking was (negatively) associated with travelers’ intention to revisit over and above the contribution from satisfaction (Assaker et al., 2011), and Wu et al. (2014) report that satisfaction, emotional value, and destination image were the strongest predictors of revisit intention in their study of 424 visitors to a theme park in Taiwan.

Within the framework of tourist experiences, Jang and Feng (2007) have further initiated a line of research in which novelty seeking and destination satisfaction were important motivators of revisit intentions. Based on survey data from overseas visitors to Canada, Jang and Feng observed that satisfaction was a significant predictor of intentions to revisit the destination within the next 12 months, but not of revisit intentions within the next 3 to 5 years. By contrast, novelty seeking was a significant antecedent of the revisit intentions within the next 3 years, but not of either the 12-month time span or the 5-year span. Although other researchers have failed to replicate this result (Bigné, Sanchez, & Andreu, 2009), the notion that revisit intentions may be driven by different dimensions of a tourist experience is an important one. Research findings further reveal that perceived attractiveness, rather than overall satisfaction, is the most important indicator of intention to revisit a destination (Um, Chon, & Ro, 2006), delineating the imperative of acknowledging the feeling of happiness versus engagement and their subsequent effects on evaluations versus future intentions.

The Purpose of the Study

The aim of the present study is to investigate two categories of positive tourist experiences and their relationship to behavioral intention. From a FWA, the two positive experiences to be analyzed are happiness and engagement. The destinations under investigation are two popular tourist sites in northern Norway. As such, the experiences at the two different destinations may function as a control variable. Although we expect some degree of overlap between the two types of positive experiences, we infer that they will behave differently as predictors of behavioral intentions. In a similar way, we will test for demographic differences. Based on the above review, we theorize that compared with happiness, engagement will be a more important motivator for intention to return to a site. However, due to lack of prior empirical research on the topic, we approach these issues in the form of research questions rather than as theoretically deduced hypotheses.

Research question 1. How are on-site reports of happiness related to travelers’ motivation to recommend a destination to friends and family (1a)?; how is happiness related to intention to revisit the destination (1b)?

Research question 2. How are on-site reports of engagement related to travelers’ motivation to recommend a destination ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Full Papers
• Research Notes
• Index