Applying the concepts of consumption emotions to tourism

Abstract

Research has highlighted the natural relationship between tourism and the concepts of hedonic experiences and experiential consumption. Understanding the emotional response to an experience can help marketers highlight important aspects of the satisfaction judgment which can lead to repurchase/revisitation behavior. This study started with Richins’ (1997) Consumption Emotion Set (CES) which contains 43 “emotion words” describing feelings experienced during a consumption experience that represent 13 proposed discrete emotions. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was conducted to reduce the set to 25 emotion descriptors that loaded into 12 emotions; peaceful, calm, optimistic, pleased, excited, discontent, worried, sad, fear, shame, envy and loneliness. While researchers continue to seek a universal set of discrete emotions, limitations are inherent with differences in context, culture, and type of consumption. The findings of this study highlight the importance of adjusting the scale to the study context. For example, this study found the emotion of “romantic love” found in the original CES as inappropriate to research in golf tourism. Follow up interviews showed that most participants in this context engage in the sport with same-gendered friends. However, if the CES was applied in a sport tourism context where couples participate, romantic love could be experienced at a significant level. Additionally, the results of this study could be different due to the immediate response to the emotion scale. Future studies should further investigate this potential as well as test scales of discrete emotions in other contexts.