A Macro View on Tourists' Emotional Experiences

Abstract

The study aims to explore tourists’ emotional experiences as a process, from an objective perspective. Experience as a subjective-objective phenomenon between the tourist and the world comes from a direct encounter with the environment, places and people. This direct sensory meeting then, through sensory impression of the destination, provokes internal emotional reactions. This perceptual process in tourists’ emotional experiences can be summarized in three steps: (1) stimulus exposure; (2) affective reactions; and (3) meaning-making. This, in turn, triggers different states of well-being, including hedonia and eudaimonia. The research employs Plutchik’s basic emotions model (Plutchik, 1980), Osgood’s semantic differential model (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), and self-determination theory (SDT) (R. M. Ryan & Deci, 2000) to represent affective reactions, meaning-making, and eudaimonia, respectively. We divide the study into three sub-studies: the first study explores methodology, the second study explores relationships between affective reactions (step two) and meaning-making (step three), and the third study explores the relationships between meaning-making (step three) and well-being (consequences of experiences).

Despite a general agreement among scholars on the nature of the tourism experience being complex, intersubjective, and multi-faceted, there is little research to address the methodological issues in this area. The first contribution of this thesis is towards an analytical methodology, which applies Web 2.0 and Corpus Linguistics (CL) in the study of tourism experience, as a way forward to explore and test theories. The study firstly seeks to understand the participation of tourists on Web 2.0. With the growing usage of Web 2.0 and tourists’ tendency to document their experiences, there are huge amounts of data available online. CL then helps extract knowledge from the documents that tourists have produced after their experiences. The second and the third studies then, apply the methodology to study tourists’ emotional experiences. The results provide objective insight into the process of tourists’ emotional experiences across several destination countries; New Zealand, France and a global sample that is comprised of 10 countries together. The findings show how holiday tourism exhibits unequal balances of positive and negative emotions. Management of both positive and negative experiences will, therefore, provide a better overall experience. The study provides directions towards improving experiences within and between modes of meanings. Moreover, the study encourages the development of emotion-based destination scales. The results generalise the differences between hedonia and eudaimonia across samples depending on the meaning-making step. They also demonstrate the experiences with the highest and lowest levels of well-being and ill-being.