Is it the novelty of travel that makes it enjoyable?

The mediation was similar for average positive emotions and for the specific emotion of interest. That similarity is the finding’s edge: if novelty worked by directly triggering interest, you would expect it to mediate interest more strongly than emotion in general. It does not, which suggests novelty works through goal congruence instead.

That travel is enjoyable because it is new is one of those claims everyone accepts and few test. Novelty, conceptualized as the experience of something new and different from the everyday, is widely believed to be what defines tourism experiences and makes them enjoyable. Mitas and Bastiaansen turn that belief into a testable mediation hypothesis.

Their evidence comes from two longitudinal datasets based on daily psychometric diaries. Measuring day by day matters for a question about emotion, because recalled holidays and experienced holidays are not the same thing. Using two datasets rather than one guards against a result peculiar to a single group.

The finding is partial mediation. The effect of tourism experience on positive emotions is indeed partly mediated by novelty, which affirms that novelty is fundamental and enjoyable in the tourism experience. Partly is the operative word: novelty carries some of the effect and leaves room for everything else travel does.

The mechanism is where the paper gets more interesting. The mediation effect is similar for average positive emotions and for the emotion of interest specifically. Had novelty worked by directly triggering interest, it should have mediated interest more strongly. That it does not suggests novelty sparks positive emotions through goal congruence instead. One caution: these are self-reported diaries, and mediation in observational data shows a pathway consistent with the data rather than proving one.