The skier as a consumer of emotions
Emotions play an important role in the evaluation of consumer experiences at a ski resort. Studies state that there are three general emotions that play a strong role in the overall perception of the mountain experience: joy, excitement, and calmness.
It is accepted that we evaluate our experiences on the mountain based on a mixture of cognitive and emotional evaluations of the aspects that interact during our experience. As emotional beings in search of pleasurable sensory experiences, we rely on these as reasons why we choose a particular mountain destination.
As snow consumers, we are motivated by the emotional benefits we imagine receiving when choosing a service and ski resorts offer multiple ones like slopes, lifts, accommodations, restaurants, stores, ski schools, rental shops, etc. When using them, we rate our experience there based on cognitive and emotional evaluations.
Both positive and negative emotions have a direct impact on our level of satisfaction and our perception is reflected not only in the services offered but also in how they were delivered. According to Dubé and Menon, there is a close relationship between affect and satisfaction. During the contracted service experience, positive emotions contribute to enhancing satisfaction, while negative emotions tend to diminish it if they are attributed to the service provider.
When evaluating the perceived value of the mountain experience, we often compare the sacrifices made to access the services offered (economic, physical effort, potential risks) and the benefit obtained from them (personal, social, psychological, aesthetic, emotional).
The vast majority of ski resorts monitor customer satisfaction by offering better services such as the quality of the slopes preparation, the speed of the lifts, the culinary offer, or the activities for non-skiers. As satisfaction stems from the overall evaluation of a product or service, the managerial scopes related to this issue involve, first of all, identifying the importance of emotions as a relevant aspect of the ski resort experience.
Based on this statement, instead of focusing only on expanding the skiable area with better lifts, more slopes, or greater artificial snow coverage, they should also focus on improving the ability to enhance consumers’ positive emotions since they are an important source of value for them.
The role of emotions in the evaluation of consumer experiences of the services provided by a ski resort can be defined in two aspects:
- First, we must recognize that emotions can bias our evaluation of something since affect exerts a great influence on the way in which information about experiences is encoded, stored, and evoked in memory.
- Second, the motivational factor is also influenced by our emotional benefit of the service. Positive emotions enhance the motivation to continue consuming a certain service.
Therefore, we can conclude that the emotions we experience in the mountain have a direct impact on the perceived value of the experience and on our own satisfaction with the services offered by a ski resort.
Recreational behavior: why do we go on skiing holidays?
The psychology of tourism is the area of social psychology that studies, among other aspects, the processes of individual and social behavior in the tourist-vacation activity.
Recreational behavior is motivated by the search for psychological reward, stress avoidance, and the escape from everyday routine. Going skiing can be considered as active vacation tourism with a regenerative objective. When we go skiing, we want to get away from our usual environment to avoid responsibilities.
Our motivations that promote skiing could be:
- To be in contact with nature that mountain environments offer and to experience freedom.
- In the dynamic aspects, our motivations for skiing would be speed, acceleration, mobility, or physical exertion. We may be motivated to ski to achieve a flow state in which our focus is on speed or gliding. Performance attributes sought would be ski mastery, coping with or rising to physical and psychological demands by testing our own performance limits.
- Good performance is not always a personal inner goal; it can also be about showing off by doing so to demonstrate our abilities. Exhibitionism also involves motivation to ski.
- Rivalry involves being faster and better than others through our need for social comparison.
- Ecstasy relates to the need to pursue risky situations to experience states of pleasurable excitement.
- In the social aspect, the desire to be part of a group depends on our personal interest, to achieve a certain status and respect from others.
- Self-development interpreted as a sense of competence in a different activity.
- Self-determination to achieve sporting and/or technical goals.
- Other motivations include exploration of new places, relaxation, learning, or the search for prestige and social status.
The psychological benefits of a ski vacation are:
- The improvement of mental health in terms of stress reduction.
- Mood regeneration.
- The confrontation of problems interpreting them from another perspective.
- The increase of creativity.
- The intensification of serotonin and dopamine levels that make possible brain revitalization.
