Are Travel Purchases More Satisfactory Than Nontravel Experiential Purchases and Material Purchases? An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Satisfaction derived from purchases can affect one's happiness and quality of life. Previous studies illustrated that this effect is not equal across purchase categories. Specifically, experiential purchases were found to bring more satisfaction and happiness to consumers than material purchases. However, these comparison studies treated a variety of experiential purchases as one homogeneous category regardless of their nature of consumption. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to bridge this gap and to assess the difference in the level of satisfaction among the three purchase categories: material, travel (composite event experiential purchases), and nontravel experiential purchases (single event experiential purchases). Moreover, this study attempted to ascertain the consistency of these differences across several purchases of each category. By analyzing the satisfaction derived from past actual purchases of 282 participants it was found that respondents were more satisfied with past travel purchases than both past nontravel experiential purchases, and past material purchases. In addition, this study found differences between US and Israeli samples regarding purchase satisfaction derived from the three categories. Lastly, this study also discovered that the price paid for purchases in each of the three categories did not have an effect on the derived satisfaction.