A Psycholinguistic View of Tourists’ Emotional Experiences

What is the emotional impact that destinations have on their tourists? We offer a psycholinguistic view of tourists’ emotional experiences, by applying a methodology that objectively reveals how destinations move tourists emotionally. Deconstructing tourists’ perceptual process, our study extracts affective reactions from destination experiences and investigates their impact on tourists’ interpretation as expressed in large samples of Web 2.0 blogs. We apply Corpus Linguistics to measure the content and weight of eight basic emotions contained in those reactions and how they influence tourists’ meaning-making in 10 destination countries. The findings first uncover these affective reactions, and secondly, how combinations of positive and negative emotions help construct meaning-making. The emotions of Anticipation and Trust are revealed as the fundamental drivers of tourism. The study contributes theoretically and empirically to emotion research as well as a new methodology to measure experiences. The results impact destination image, experience, motivation, and satisfaction research.