Measuring Tourists Happiness: the case of the Algarve

• Autor(a) principal: Mendes, Júlio
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Outros Autores: Pereira, Luis Nobre, Manuela Guerreiro, Maria
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/921
• topic: Tourist hapiness; Tourist quality of life; Tourist satisfaction; Logit regression

Happiness and Quality of Life (QoL) have been receiving attention since many of the social ills have been reduced in the Western World. Happiness is considered one of the contributors to good QoL: if a community has happy citizens, their QoL is viewed as generally good (Veenhoven, 1997). In the same way, tourists’ happiness and QoL have become an important and interesting issue of research. However, measuring tourists’ happiness is a changeling problem. In this paper we present research on measuring tourists’ happiness. First, we have developed a model to explain the effect of different life domains on tourists’ happiness. Results indicated that both satisfaction with their family life and satisfaction with their jobs and activities play a significant role in determining overall happiness. After that, we have developed a model to identify which QoL factors influence tourists’ happiness. Results indicated that both present tourists’ QoL and QoL of their friends have a significant effect on tourists’ general happiness. A survey sample of tourists in the Algarve was used to test binary logistic regression models to detect factors affecting the probability of being at a specific level of happiness.