The Role of Destination Emotion in Domestic Destination Choice Intention of Students: Preliminary Testing of Scale

The student travel market has boomed in Vietnam in recent years. This growth has brought significant opportunities for domestic tourism destinations as student travelers often prefer short-haul journeys due to poor budget. Understanding their destination choices is crucial for policy-makers of those destinations. The purpose of this article is to propose a conceptual model for predicting the intention of domestic tourism destination choice among student travelers and test measurement scales preliminarily. Building upon literature review, the paper integrates destination emotion into the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) model. Consequently, in the extended TPB model, intention to visit a domestic destinationin of a student is assumed to be influenced directly and positively not only by the original factors (attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control) but also by emotions towards the destination such as joy, love, and positive surprise. Moreover, preliminary test revealed that measurement scales are suitable for further research.