Prevalence of alternative processing rules in the formation of daily travel satisfaction in the context multi-trip, multi-stage, multi-attribute travel experiences

Requesting respondents to provide satisfaction ratings for multi-stage trips or daily travel experiences implies they have to value each stage, respectively trip, based on memory recall and then cognitively integrate these judgments into the requested satisfaction rating. Our knowledge about the prevalence of alternate processing rules that may be used to arrive at trip satisfaction ratings is very limited. Research on this topic in travel behavior analysis is very scarce indeed. In contributing to the research on travel satisfaction, we therefore compare the performance of different processing rules using data on satisfaction with public transport trips from Xi’an, China. Based on the results of this study, we found the peak-end rule, except for the disjunctive rule, consistently had the lowest explained variance, also after controlling for socio-demographics, mood and personality traits. Rather, for all estimated models, the conjunctive processing rule had the highest associated explained variance. It suggests that the trip stage, respectively trip, with the lowest satisfaction dominates overall satisfaction. Also, we did not find much evidence of a recency effect. Rather, the satisfaction of the first trip or stage has higher marginal effects on overall satisfaction than more recent trips or stages.