Measuring Emotions in Real Time: Implications for Tourism Design

This study introduces a new approach to assess travellers’ emotions in natural settings, and discusses the implications of this approach within the context of designing tourism places. In particular, recent advancements in technology enable researchers to measure individual’s electrodermal activity (EDA), a primary physiological measure of emotions, within a wide range of environments. This paper reports the results of a case study which tracked the emotions of two visitors to Philadelphia, USA over four days. The results indicate that the Philadelphia visitors exhibited a substantial variation in emotions depending upon the places visited, their activities, and the people they met; also, the two responded differently to the environment throughout the four days. It is concluded that the ability to measure travellers’ emotions across settings and in real time can help to explain the relationship between physical and social environments and emotion, and in turn, provides an extremely useful tool for evaluating alternative strategies for designing and managing tourism places.