Analyzing effects of personality and mood on travel satisfaction:a path analysis model

Travel satisfaction refers to people's evaluation of transport services and their experience during travel. This topic has recently started to attract attention in transportation research. Previous studies on travel satisfaction have typically tried to understand the effects of trip-related objective attributes such as travel mode, travel time and travel cost on people's travel satisfaction. The interpretation of these results may be problematic if studies ignore people's psychological conditions when they provided the satisfaction ratings. The effects of travel attributes may then be confounded with effects of personality and mood. The aim of this study is to analyse the direct or indirect effects of personality and mood on differential degrees of travel satisfaction of each trip stage using the path analysis approach. Results show that mood directly influences travel satisfaction, while the effects of personality are indirect.