THE EMOTIONS OF ELDERLY CONSUMERS IN THE PROCESS OF CHOICE OF TRAVEL DESTINATIONS

• Main Authors: Priscila Silva Esteves, Luiz Antonio Slongo, Cristiane Silva Esteves, Renato Hübner Barcelos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Maria 2013-09-01
• Series: Revista de Administração da UFSM
• Subjects: Emotions; consumer behavior; elderly consumers; tourism.
• Online Access: http://cascavel.ufsm.br/revistas/ojs-2.2.2/index.php/reaufsm/article/download/5581/pdf

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.