Business Commons^™

Satisfaction Vs Experienced Utility: Current Issues And Opportunities, Maksim Godovykh, Asli D. A. Tasci

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Satisfaction is one of the most studied constructs in many fields, including tourism. As an important marketing metric, satisfaction is typically measured with self-reported retrospective evaluations of travel experience. However, the memory-based approaches have numerous limitations related to social desirability, availability heuristics, previous knowledge, mood at the time of answering questions and do not reflect the moment-by-moment nature of visitor experience. The shortcomings and limitations of self-reported retrospective evaluations could be eliminated by introducing pre-visit, on-site, and post-visit instant components of experienced utility as measures of visitor experience. The experienced utility allows eliminating the majority of self-report biases, capturing the …