📄 social science

Evaluating leisure travel experiences: the comparative explanatory relevance of satisfaction and perceived value for future behavioral intentions

Based on a study of 600 Chinese leisure travelers, this paper demonstrates that while satisfaction and perceived value are distinct constructs, perceived value is the superior predictor of future behavioral intentions, explaining significant additional variance beyond satisfaction and travel motivation.

Original authors: SICHENG LI, JINGQI WANG

Published 2026-10-15

📖 5 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: SICHENG LI, JINGQI WANG

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

When we return from a vacation, we often carry two distinct feelings about the trip. The first is a simple sense of enjoyment: the trip was pleasant, the scenery was beautiful, and the experience met our expectations. In the world of tourism research, this feeling is called satisfaction. It is a measure of how favorably we view the experience itself. The second feeling is more complex and practical: we weigh the joy we felt against the cost of getting there. This includes not just the price of the ticket, but the hours spent in transit, the physical effort of hiking, the stress of navigating crowds, and the time taken away from other parts of our lives. This calculation of whether the benefits were worth the sacrifice is known as perceived value. For decades, travel experts have assumed that if a traveler is satisfied, they will naturally want to return or recommend the destination to others. However, a new study suggests that these two feelings, while often linked, are not the same thing when it comes to predicting what a traveler will do next.

Researchers Sicheng Li and Jingqi Wang set out to test this assumption by looking closely at how Chinese leisure travelers evaluate their recent trips. They gathered data from 600 adults who had taken a domestic or international vacation within the last year. The participants were asked to recall their most recent trip and answer questions about their motivation for traveling, how satisfied they were with the experience, how much value they felt they received for their time and money, and how likely they were to visit again or tell others about it. The researchers also measured a personality trait called openness to experience, which describes how curious and receptive a person is to new ideas, diverse activities, and novel situations. By analyzing these responses, the team aimed to see if feeling happy about a trip is enough to guarantee future travel plans, or if the judgment of "worth" plays a more critical role.

The results revealed a striking difference between being satisfied and finding value. While the two concepts were strongly related—people who enjoyed their trip generally felt it was also a good use of their resources—they provided very different information about future behavior. When the researchers looked at what predicted a traveler's intention to return or recommend a destination, perceived value was the dominant factor. It explained a significant amount of the variation in future plans that satisfaction alone could not. In fact, once the researchers accounted for how much a traveler felt the trip was worth, the feeling of satisfaction added almost no extra information. This means a person can be highly satisfied with a vacation, finding it enjoyable and meeting all their expectations, yet still decide not to go back because the cost, time, or effort required to repeat the experience feels too high. Conversely, a trip that might not have been the most thrilling or perfect in every way could still generate strong future intentions if the traveler felt the benefits justified the sacrifices made.

The study also explored whether this relationship changed depending on who the traveler was. The researchers found that the link between perceived value and future travel plans was stronger for people who scored high on openness to experience. These are individuals who tend to be more curious, imaginative, and eager for new experiences. For them, the judgment that a trip was "worth it" translated more powerfully into a desire to engage in similar activities again. For those lower in openness, the connection was still positive but less intense. This suggests that personality shapes how we convert our feelings about a trip's value into concrete plans for the future.

Crucially, the researchers were careful to clarify what their data could and could not prove. Because the study asked people to recall a past trip and report their feelings all at once, it could not determine which feeling came first in a person's mind. Did they feel the trip was valuable first, which then made them satisfied? Or did they feel satisfied first, which then led them to judge it as valuable? The data showed that both possible sequences fit the results equally well. Therefore, the study does not claim that one feeling causes the other. Instead, it demonstrates that when trying to understand what a traveler will do next, the judgment of worth provides unique and essential information that the feeling of satisfaction does not.

This finding challenges the common practice in the travel industry of relying solely on satisfaction scores to predict loyalty. A destination might receive glowing reviews for its beauty and service, yet fail to attract repeat visitors if the journey there is too arduous, expensive, or inconvenient. The study suggests that managers and planners need to look beyond whether an experience was enjoyable and ask whether it felt worthwhile relative to the resources spent. For travelers, the lesson is that our future choices are driven not just by how much we liked a place, but by a deeper calculation of whether the experience was worth the price we paid in time, money, and effort. By distinguishing between enjoying a moment and valuing the trade-off, we gain a clearer picture of what truly drives our desire to explore the world again.

Technical Summary: Evaluating Leisure Travel Experiences

Problem Statement
The study addresses a critical gap in tourism research regarding post-experience evaluation. While it is well-established that both satisfaction (experiential favorability) and perceived value (experiential worth) predict future behavioral intentions, it remains unclear whether these constructs provide comparable unique information when modeled simultaneously. Existing literature often embeds these variables in directional networks (e.g., value $\rightarrow$ satisfaction $\rightarrow$ intention) or treats them as interchangeable indicators of positive experience. The authors argue that an individual may evaluate a trip as highly enjoyable (satisfaction) yet deem it insufficiently worthwhile relative to the monetary, temporal, and physical resources sacrificed (perceived value). The central research question is whether satisfaction and perceived value differ in their incremental explanatory relevance for future behavioral intentions once their shared variance is accounted for, and whether this relationship is moderated by personality traits, specifically openness to experience.

Methodology

Data Source: The study utilized survey data from 600 Chinese leisure travelers who had completed a domestic or international trip within the preceding 12 months. Data were collected via online convenience and snowball sampling between May and June 2026.
Measures:
- Travel Motivation: 11-item scale (Zhang & Liu, 2009; based on Kozak, 2002).
- Destination Satisfaction: 5-item scale (Yoon & Uysal, 2005).
- Perceived Value: 18-item scale adapted for destination contexts (Sánchez et al., 2006), covering functional (quality/price), emotional, and social value.
- Behavioral Intention: 5-item scale (Chen & Tsai, 2007), encompassing revisit, recommendation, and willingness to pay more.
- Openness to Experience: 12-item adapted measure based on Big Five content (Soto & John, 2017).
Analytical Strategy:
- Measurement Model: A five-construct Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was performed to establish discriminant validity. Competing models (e.g., combining satisfaction and value) were tested to assess construct distinctiveness.
- Structural Analysis: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression was used to test incremental explanatory relevance. The authors compared models adding perceived value to a baseline of motivation and satisfaction, versus adding satisfaction to a baseline of motivation and perceived value.
- Model Equivalence: To address the limitation of cross-sectional data regarding temporal precedence, the authors estimated "satisfaction-upstream" and "value-upstream" recursive specifications to test for fit equivalence.
- Moderation: Conditional process analysis (Hayes, 2017) was used to test if openness to experience moderates the relationship between perceived value and behavioral intention.
- Robustness: Analyses included covariate adjustments (demographics, travel frequency), heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors (HC3), and facet-level sensitivity analyses.

Key Results

Construct Distinctiveness: A five-construct CFA model (separating satisfaction and perceived value) fit significantly better ( $\Delta\chi^2 = 1763.927, p < .001$ ) than a four-construct model combining them. This confirms that satisfaction and perceived value are empirically distinct, despite a strong correlation ( $r = .710$ ).
Incremental Explanatory Relevance:
- Perceived Value: When added to a model containing travel motivation and destination satisfaction, perceived value explained an additional 15.65% of the variance in behavioral intention ( $\Delta R^2 = .1565, p < .001$ ).
- Satisfaction: Conversely, when added to a model containing travel motivation and perceived value, destination satisfaction explained virtually no additional variance ( $\Delta R^2 = .0002, p = .696$ ).
- Conclusion: Perceived value retains substantial unique information regarding future intentions that is not captured by satisfaction judgments.
Temporal Precedence: The "satisfaction-upstream" and "value-upstream" structural specifications were fit-equivalent (identical AIC, BIC, and log-likelihood). This indicates that the cross-sectional data cannot determine the psychological order of these evaluations; the observed explanatory asymmetry reflects information content, not causal sequence.
Moderation: Openness to experience significantly strengthened the positive association between perceived value and behavioral intention ( $B = .3262, p < .001$ ). The relationship was stronger for individuals with higher openness.
Facet Analysis: While functional value (quality and price) showed significant coefficients in simultaneous facet models, the high intercorrelation among value dimensions ( $r > .91$ ) limited dimension-specific interpretation. The construct-level result held across sensitivity analyses.

Key Contributions

Distinguishing Favorability from Worth: The study demonstrates that "experiential favorability" (satisfaction) and "experiential worth" (perceived value) are not behaviorally equivalent. A favorable evaluation does not automatically translate to a judgment that the experience is worth the resources invested.
Explanatory Asymmetry vs. Temporal Precedence: The paper clarifies that greater incremental explanatory power does not imply temporal or causal precedence. The authors show that while perceived value is a stronger predictor of intention in this dataset, cross-sectional data cannot establish whether value judgments precede satisfaction judgments.
Boundary Conditions: The study identifies openness to experience as a boundary condition, suggesting that the translation of perceived value into future intention is stronger for individuals who are more receptive to novelty and diverse experiences.

Significance and Claims
The authors claim that their findings challenge the assumption that favorable post-experience evaluations are interchangeable predictors of future behavior. They argue that tourism managers and researchers must distinguish between whether an experience was "enjoyable" and whether it was "worthwhile" relative to costs. The study posits that high satisfaction alone is insufficient to guarantee strong future behavioral intentions if the perceived value (benefits vs. sacrifices) is low. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes the methodological importance of separating explanatory relevance from temporal ordering in cross-sectional tourism research, cautioning against interpreting directional paths in structural models as evidence of psychological sequence without longitudinal data.

The authors explicitly note limitations, including the cross-sectional design (precluding causal inference), reliance on self-reported data (potential common method variance), and the use of convenience sampling. They suggest that future research should employ longitudinal designs to verify temporal ordering and differentiate between first-time and repeat visitors.

Technical Summary: Evaluating Leisure Travel Experiences

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