The Potential of Tourism for Benefiting Individual Short-term and Long-term Wellbeing: A Character-strength-based Exploration

Despite the growing interest in exploring the potential of tourism in benefiting individual long-term eudaimonic wellbeing, limited studies indeed investigated into the approaches to expand such benefits, and they mostly focus on special types of tourism. This study proposes character-strength employment as a promising direction to fulfill the potential of regular tourism activities to foster individual eudaimonic wellbeing, without compromising the hedonic travel pleasure. Adopting experimental design and mixed quantitative and qualitative analyses, this study supports the potential of strength-based travel design for wellbeing enhancement, by revealing: 1) the unique advantage of regular tourism activities in cultivating transcendence- and humanity-related strengthsthat are less likely employed in daily settings, and 2) the positive association of after-trip hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing with transcendence-related strengthsthat are uniquely cultivated in tourism. Practically, it informs the incorporation of strength cultivation in travel design and marketing to optimize wellbeing benefits from tourism