The emotions of elderly consumers in the process of choice of travel destinations

Abstract

Emotions have great importance in purchasing decisions, however, only recently, researchers started to study them by qualitative approaches. In this context, this study sought to examine them in a still unexplored segment: elderly consumers. For this purpose, this research concentrated in a service for which they have shown a lot of interest – tourism – in order to analyze the emotions present in the choice of travel destinations and their influence on future purchasing decisions. That was done with the use of in-depth interviews aided by the Photo Elicitation Technique (PET). It was then observed that emotions affect the choice for a particular travel destination because the sensations experienced during previous trips are stored in memory and have a strong influence on future decision-making processes. This work also brings interesting contributions for future research because it investigated the occurrence of emotions in 3 separate stages of the consumption process – before, during and after the trip – and not only as just one element in this decision, as normally occurs in most researches about emotions. By demonstrating that this was a favorable decision to better understand the emotions throughout the entire purchase decision process, new paths are opened for further research with different methodological approaches.