Patterns of tourists' emotional responses, satisfaction, and intention to recommend

Previous efforts to understand and predict behavior traditionally categorize tourists into sub-groups using socio-demographic and psychographic variables. Surprisingly, the tourism literature does not profile tourists by the intensity of their emotional associations toward destinations. To address the literature gap, this paper empirically identifies distinguishable patterns of tourist emotional responses and investigates relationships between tourists' emotional profiles and their post-consumption evaluations of satisfaction and intention to recommend. Cluster analysis uncovers five distinct emotional response patterns among tourists: delighted, unemotionals, negatives, mixed, and passionate. Multiple discriminant analysis confirms the validity of the five-cluster solution. The five tourist groups differ by their satisfaction level and propensity to recommend destinations. These findings offer important implications for destination marketers designing segmentation and branding strategies. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.