Effects of traveller's mood and personality on ratings of satisfaction with daily trip stages

- Study revealed the existence of direct and indirect effects on travel satisfaction.
- Being happy and relaxed leads to high travel satisfaction.
- Being critical and easy-going leads to high travel satisfaction.
- Women and older people are more satisfied in general with travel.

Travel satisfaction refers to people's evaluation of transport services and their experience during travel. This topic has recently become of increasing interest within the transportation research community. Previous studies on travel satisfaction have typically tried to understand the effects of trip-related objective attributes such as travel mode, travel time and travel cost on people's travel satisfaction. The interpretation of these results may be biased if studies ignore people's psychological dispositions such as mood and personality traits because these factors likely influence satisfaction ratings. The effects of travel attributes may then be confounded with omitted, but likely correlated, effects of personality and mood. The aim of this study is examine whether personality and mood are systematically related to travel satisfaction. More specifically, the direct and indirect effects of personality and mood on ratings of travel satisfaction of each trip stage are investigated using path analysis. Results show that mood directly influences travel satisfaction, while the effects of personality are both direct and indirect. It implies that studies of travel satisfaction that have ignored these factors may have reported biased effects of travel attributes on travel satisfaction.