How Our Mood Influences Travel Destination Choice

Abstract

We do not always want the same kind of trip, even when our core preferences remain relatively stable. The same person may, at one point, be drawn to a lively, social destination and, at another, prefer more nature, privacy, or a slower pace. The central argument of this paper is that this shift can be understood as a change in the fit between person and destination. Mood and broader psychological state are associated with travel preferences, with environmental characteristics that become more attractive, and with the way travelers evaluate their options (Io, 2023; Kinczel et al., 2025; Li et al., 2021; Pinho & Gomes, 2026; Zhou et al., 2024).

The literature allows us to view destination fit as a dynamic process. What we feel now may be related to what we seek to change or preserve. Emotion regulation and environmental self-regulation help explain why different environments can acquire different psychological value. The image we hold of a destination, the information we receive, and the mental simulation of a future experience then shape what we believe each option can offer us (Cooper & Buckley, 2022; Karl et al., 2023; Ríos-Rodríguez et al., 2024; Vitale & Bonaiuto, 2024).

The approach taken here does not treat mood as simply another factor in a long list of variables. It addresses a specific scientific question: when the traveler's state changes, does their fit with a destination change as well? Findings from tourism behavior, environmental psychology, destination-image research, and affective forecasting illuminate different aspects of the same phenomenon and converge on a common direction: the relationship between person and place is dynamic and depends on the moment, the need, the perception, and the anticipated experience.

Key Terms

1. The Same Destination Is Not Always the Same Trip

A destination's attractiveness does not depend only on what it offers. It also depends on the state of the person evaluating it at that particular moment.

Sometimes we want a trip full of movement, people, and stimulation. At other times, those very same elements may feel more exhausting than exciting. The place may remain the same, but the person evaluating it is not always in the same state. The critical research question is whether this shift is in fact associated with different preferences for destinations and for their characteristics.

A direct indication comes from Zhou and colleagues. At the end of a particularly restrictive lockdown period in Australia, 946 valid participants took part in a stated choice experiment, choosing among hypothetical international destinations that varied in nature, culture, outdoor activities, entertainment, social-distancing measures, and cost. Negative emotions associated with the lockdown period were also recorded. The analysis showed that these emotions were associated with different destination choices and with different evaluations of specific destination attributes (Zhou et al., 2024).

The significance of this finding lies in the fact that the emotional state had been formed before the destinations were evaluated and in a different life context. Yet it appeared within the travel choice itself. Travelers, therefore, do not evaluate a place from a psychologically neutral starting point.

More directly still, Li and colleagues examined whether different states are associated with different environmental preferences. In a sample of 1,022 students, those in a fatigued state showed a greater preference for landscapes with higher naturalness, while indignation was associated with a greater preference for relatively more private landscapes (Li et al., 2021). What changes here is not merely a general attitude toward travel. The type of environment that appears more attractive changes as well.

The same direction appears in the relationship between travelers' motives and the characteristics they seek in a place. Io showed that daily emotional well-being moderated the relationships among push motivations, pull motivations, and satisfaction. In that study, escape and relaxation were associated with the desire for a leisure trip, while safety and convenience emerged as important attributes in destination selection (Io, 2023). In this sense, how someone feels in everyday life participates in the link between why they want to travel and what they seek in a destination.

In a different population, Pinho and Gomes studied 305 Generation Z young people in Portugal. Self-reported anxiety and depressive states were associated with different emphasis on factors such as economy, convenience, and sustainability in destination choice, as well as with a greater preference for wellness activities during the trip (Pinho & Gomes, 2026). The study uses different variables from those above, but records the same basic pattern: internal state is associated with different travel choices.

The picture broadens when we consider the wider context of everyday life. Kinczel and colleagues studied employees in Hungary and linked work-related and non-work well-being factors with actual and future travel preferences. Different combinations of factors, including work-life balance, job satisfaction, and energy, were associated with different preferences, ranging from nature and quiet places to sport, food, and other forms of travel experience (Kinczel et al., 2025).

These studies use different concepts and methods, yet they converge on a common point. A person's state before travel is associated with which destinations, environmental characteristics, and types of experience become more attractive. In this sense, when how we are changes, our fit with a destination may change as well.

2. From What We Feel to What We Seek

We do not choose only a place. We also choose the conditions in which we believe we can live the experience we are looking for.

The literature on travel motivation offers a first explanation. In a review spanning half a century of research, Crompton organizes six core vacation motives around the idea that a state of disequilibrium can activate behaviors aimed at restoring equilibrium. The motives he highlights include curiosity, boredom alleviation, contact with nature, reinforcement of close bonds, and ego enhancement (Crompton, 2025). The relevance of this approach to destination choice is that travel acquires meaning in relation to what is missing, pressing, or in need of reinforcement before the trip.

Environmental psychology takes the argument one step further. The environmental self-regulation hypothesis proposes that people may consciously, or without full awareness, use their physical environment to regulate their emotions (Ríos-Rodríguez et al., 2024). Choosing an environment, therefore, may itself form part of the regulation process.

The review by Vitale and Bonaiuto strengthens this point. Contact with nature is associated overall with positive effects on emotion-regulation processes, including reduced rumination and worry and greater use of adaptive regulation strategies (Vitale & Bonaiuto, 2024). The environment, therefore, is not merely the backdrop to an experience. It can actively participate in how we feel.

In tourism, Lin and Yang describe restoration as the outcome of multiple mechanisms activated by environmental change: physical and psychological distance from everyday life, new stimulation, emotion regulation, mental adjustment, and physiological improvement (Lin & Yang, 2024). Travel experience thus takes on a function that depends both on the environment and on the state from which the traveler begins.

The desired outcome is not always calm. Self-determination theory draws attention to needs such as autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Çiki and Tanriverdi showed that satisfaction of these needs in cultural travel was associated with subjective well-being, engagement, and behavioral intentions (Çiki & Tanriverdi, 2025). What someone wants to experience may therefore be calm, but it may also be exploration, autonomy, social connection, curiosity, or a sense of competence.

Zhang and colleagues add the perspective of the environment itself. In virtual tourism experiences using real scenes, different landscape types produced different outcomes in relaxation, concentration, and positive or negative affect, while individual differences were also observed (Zhang et al., 2023). This connects the two ends of the argument: different states can orient us toward different environments, and different environments can in fact produce different psychological outcomes.

Destination fit, therefore, is not a label that belongs to a place by itself. It concerns the relationship between what a person needs or seeks and the conditions that a particular environment can offer.

3. Fit Is Shaped by the Image We Have of a Place

Before we travel, we do not compare the real place. We compare what we believe the place is with what we imagine it can offer us.

Cooper and Buckley describe this process as a mental match between what the traveler wants and what they believe the destination can provide (Cooper & Buckley, 2022). This idea is particularly important for the present review: if what the traveler wants or needs changes, the destination that appears to fit best may also change, even if the destinations themselves have not changed.

This match is built on destination image, the mental representation formed through information, previous experience, photographs, videos, social media, reviews, and other people's narratives. Andrlić and colleagues argue that the cognitive and affective components of this image vary according to the stage of the decision process, the type of traveler, and the type of destination (Andrlić et al., 2025). The image of a place is not static. It changes as the decision process itself changes.

Information can substantially alter that image. Wang and Yan showed that the quality of tourism content on social media was associated with travel intention, while self-congruity and trust functioned as mediating mechanisms (Wang & Yan, 2022). Khozaei and colleagues further showed that people can form expectations even about parts of a place they have not seen, mentally completing missing visual information (Khozaei et al., 2025).

Psychological state may influence not only what we seek, but also how we take in this information. Li, Xiao, and Seekamp examined images of natural and built destinations and showed that perceived stress moderates the relationship between visual attention and emotional response (Li, Xiao, & Seekamp, 2026). In other words, two people, or the same person in different states, may not process the same destination image in the same way.

The visual presentation of a place also has direct emotional power. Di-Clemente and colleagues showed that destination images evoke measurable emotional responses and that conscious positive responses are associated with stronger behavioral intentions (Di-Clemente et al., 2022). In a different environmental context, She and colleagues found emotional state to be the strongest of the factors they examined in relation to flower-color preference (She et al., 2025). These findings reinforce the idea that judgments of a place's aesthetics and attractiveness are not independent of the observer's state.

Person-destination fit is therefore formed between two changing sides: what the traveler wants from this particular trip and the image they have formed of what each place can offer.

4. Before We Choose, We Try the Trip in Our Imagination

Fit is not completed by a list of attributes. Travelers can mentally place themselves inside a future experience and estimate how they believe they would feel.

Episodic future thinking is the ability to imagine personal future events. The neuroscientific meta-analysis by Cona and colleagues shows that future-oriented cognition relies on organized neural networks, with the default network playing a particularly important role in thinking about the future (Cona et al., 2023).

Imagining the future also has emotional force. The systematic review and meta-analysis by Morton and MacLeod, covering 16 studies and 1,735 participants, showed that future events participants were asked to imagine were associated with more positive emotion than memories, even though memories were more vivid (Morton & MacLeod, 2023). This means that a future experience can begin to acquire emotional value before it happens.

Karl and colleagues bring this process directly into tourism decision-making. Affective forecasting describes the process by which we first form a mental representation of a future event and then predict the emotion, its intensity, and its duration. In an experimental study of vacation accommodation, activating episodic future thinking increased intention toward the options, with trust and perceived risk playing important roles (Karl et al., 2023).

The importance of anticipated emotion is also confirmed on a broader scale. Chiu and Cho's meta-analysis brought together 37 studies and 39 samples, totaling 14,581 participants, and showed that positive anticipated emotion was the strongest determinant of desire in the model of goal-directed behavior (Chiu & Cho, 2022). Song and colleagues showed that expectations can be ambivalent: hope and anxiety can coexist before travel and jointly influence travel intention (Song et al., 2024).

When a decision involves more than one person, anticipation expands. Mas and colleagues show that the expected emotional response of a travel companion may also enter the evaluation (Mas et al., 2025). Fit then concerns not only "how I think I will feel," but also "how I think this experience will be for us."

This adds a critical layer to dynamic fit. We do not choose only on the basis of what we know about a place. We also choose on the basis of the experience we can imagine having there and the emotion we expect it to produce.

5. The Actual Experience Confirms or Changes the Fit

On arrival, the mental image meets the real experience. The environment is no longer an expectation; it becomes a source of lived emotion.

In Chen and colleagues' model of honeymoon travel, perceived destination attributes influenced emotions and memorable tourism experiences, which were subsequently associated with overall satisfaction and behavioral intentions (Chen et al., 2022). The study shows that destination attributes acquire psychological meaning through the emotion and experience they generate.

The relationship also works in the opposite direction. Prayag and colleagues showed that emotional experiences act as antecedents of overall destination image and satisfaction (Prayag et al., 2017). The image we had before the trip may therefore be revised by the emotion we eventually experience.

Nguyen and Duong's study of nostalgia likewise shows that a specific lived emotion can strengthen destination image and positive word-of-mouth intentions (Nguyen & Duong, 2025). The choice cycle does not end with the booking: experience returns to memory and to the image of the place, and may influence subsequent choices.

Actual experience therefore acts as a test of anticipated fit. The traveler may have predicted that a place would offer calm, energy, exploration, or connection. After the trip, they now have lived information about whether that expectation was confirmed, and that information becomes part of future choices.

6. What the Evidence Suggests About Person-Destination Fit

The literature converges on a coherent picture: fit with a destination is shaped by the meeting of a changing human state with a changing perception of the travel option.

The first side of fit is the person at a particular moment. Mood, fatigue, daily emotional well-being, and other aspects of state have been associated with different travel preferences, different environmental characteristics, and different choice motives (Io, 2023; Kinczel et al., 2025; Li et al., 2021; Pinho & Gomes, 2026; Zhou et al., 2024).

The second side is what the person seeks to experience. Research on motivation, basic psychological needs, and emotion regulation suggests that people use experiences and environments for restoration, stimulation, connection, autonomy, and other desired states (Crompton, 2025; Çiki & Tanriverdi, 2025; Ríos-Rodríguez et al., 2024; Vitale & Bonaiuto, 2024).

The third side is the destination as it is perceived before travel. The image of the place is formed by information, previous experiences, visual stimuli, trust, and expectations. Cooper and Buckley describe this relationship as a mental match between what the traveler wants and what they believe the destination can provide (Cooper & Buckley, 2022).

The fourth side is the anticipated experience. Through episodic future thinking and affective forecasting, the traveler can imagine themselves in an option and estimate how they think they will feel. The literature shows that this forecast plays a substantive role in shaping desire and intention (Chiu & Cho, 2022; Karl et al., 2023).

Final choice still occurs within real-world constraints. Price, access, safety, availability, and perceived risk also enter the decision, as the broader destination-choice literature shows (Babu & Murugesan, 2024; Hinlayagan et al., 2023; Loi et al., 2024). These variables define the feasible set of options. The question addressed here is different: among feasible options, why might one place fit better at one moment and less well at another?

There are also findings that help define the boundaries of the argument more precisely. Klopp and Mealey did not reproduce the predicted shifts in natural-landscape preference through experimentally induced mood and raised the issue of the ecological validity of artificial mood induction (Klopp & Mealey, 1998). This finding is useful because it suggests that dynamic fit needs to be examined in real or ecologically valid states rather than as a simple one-to-one mapping between an emotion and a type of landscape.

The central idea can be stated simply without becoming simplistic: the same person does not necessarily have the same fit with the same destination on every trip. When how they feel, what they need, what they want to experience, and how they perceive the available options change, the destination that appears most suitable may change as well. This is the dynamic person-destination fit that deserves systematic testing.

Research Direction

The strongest next test would be a longitudinal design following the same traveler before search, during choice, and after the trip. The study could separately measure mood, fatigue, daily well-being, and perceived stress; record what the traveler wants to experience; examine how they evaluate different destinations; and assess how they predict they would feel in each one. After the trip, the forecast could be compared with the actual experience.

Such a design would allow the same person to be tested at different points in time. If changes in state are systematically accompanied by changes in the evaluation of the same destinations, we would have much stronger evidence for dynamic fit. It would also be possible to test whether destination image and anticipated emotion mediate the relationship between the traveler's state and the final choice.

Affective forecasting also offers a second criterion of success: not only which destination the traveler chose, but how closely the actual experience matched what they expected to feel. Karl and colleagues describe affective forecasting errors as overestimating or underestimating the expected emotional impact of a future event (Karl et al., 2023).

Conclusion

The research reviewed here does not treat the traveler as a fixed profile that simply seeks the same type of destination each time. It shows that pre-travel state can be associated with different destination choices, different environmental preferences, different motives, and different ways of processing information. At the same time, environmental psychology shows that people can use environments for emotion regulation, while affective-forecasting research shows that future experience is mentally simulated before choice.

These lines of research meet in one central idea: person-destination fit is a relationship, not a permanent trait. The destination that fits us best today may not be the one that fits us best at another time, because how we are, what we want to experience, or how we perceive our options may have changed.

The essential question in travel choice, therefore, is not only "Which destination do I like?" It is also "Which destination best fits what I need and want to experience on this particular trip?"

References