Emotions, motivations and destination positioning

• Autor(a) principal: Marques, Carlos Peixeira
• Data de Publicação: 2005
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10348/1485
• topic: Travel motivation; social psychology of tourism; destination marketing

This paper presents a latent two-factor (pleasantness and arousal) model that successfully explains the affective perception of the routine daily environment by visitors to Douro Valley, a widely known wine region whose cultural landscape has been acknowledged as World Heritage, and is becoming an emergent tourism destination. Visitors more often attribute agitation related emotions to their home environment and pleasant low activated emotions to the destination. Level of urbanization of tourists’ residence was shown to be negatively related to pleasantness and positively related to arousal, which, in its turn, is positively related to escape motives and to the peaceful image of Douro. These findings, complemented with destination perceptions measured on a national sample of domestic travelers, are taken into account to contribute to targeting and positioning decisions, focusing discussion on the issue of destinations’ substitutability.