The direct and indirect influence of experience quality on satisfaction: the importance of emotions

This paper examines visitor satisfaction in the context of heritage tourism in two tourist-historic heritage destinations: Seville and York. The study investigates the direct and indirect relationships between quality of experience, perceived value and emotions on satisfaction. The results show that the quality of experience positively and directly influences satisfaction through the cognitive variable perceived value and the affective variable emotions. The indirect effect of quality of experience through emotions on satisfaction was greater compared with the indirect effective through perceived value. Therefore, this study draws attention to the importance of quality of experience and emotions on visitor satisfaction. Given that heritage tourism has the potential to elicit emotional and experiential responses by visitors, these findings have significant management implications for heritage destination managers when considering the heritage visitor experience.