Do the emotions of tourist agents contribute to improving the sustainable planning of a territory?

The sustainability of a territory is achieved through orderly, balanced and harmonious planning over time. Sustainable tourism planning must incorporate the emotions of interest groups. Based on a scale of negative and positive emotions that has already been validated, a participatory study of a qualitative nature has been developed with 118 hotel managers from the region of Extremadura, in the south-west of Spain. In addition, another quantitative research study has been carried out, using a longitudinal exploratory model analyzed in three phases throughout the years 2021 and 2022, using the SEM-PLS methodology. The objective is to detect if the II Tourism Plan (2021-2023) can influence the willingness of hotel managers to participate, and if this participation generates emotions that enrich the planning process of the tourist authorities. The results highlight the importance of completing decision making (cognitive part) with the measurement of emotions (sensitive part) of private agents to involve them in the planning process.

Automated summary

The sustainability of a territory is achieved through orderly, balanced, and harmonious planning over time. Sustainable tourism planning must consider the emotions of interest groups. A participatory qualitative study was conducted with 118 hotel managers from the Extremadura region in Spain, using a validated scale of negative and positive emotions. In addition, a quantitative longitudinal exploratory study was carried out to analyze the influence of the II Tourism Plan (2021-2023) on hotel managers' willingness to participate and the emotions generated from this participation in the planning process.