Humorous or serious? The interaction effect of language style and tourism activity type on tourist well-being

Abstract

Promoting Well-being is one of United Nations’ sustainable development goals and it also attracts increasing attentions in tourism research. Based on the stereotype content model (SCM), this study examines the interaction effect of service employees’ language style and tourism activity type on tourist well-being. The mediating effects of perceived pleasure and perceived professionalism is also studied. The theoretical value of this paper is two-fold: First, it is the first study of the adaptability of tourism activities to different language styles and of how this adaptability difference affects tourist hedonia and eudaimonia. The discovery of the interaction effect between tourism activity type and language style also provides a legitimate explanation for resolving the contradiction between humour and seriousness in previous studies. Second, this study sheds new light on the stereotype content model. It introduces two new constructs—perceived pleasure and professionalism and reveals their mediation effect in the interaction effect. These constructs support affective and cognitive evaluations of social judgments. Our findings have important implications for tourism practitioners who seek to develop effective service strategies to enhance tourist well-being and thus promote sustainable tourism.

Keywords:

• Language style
• tourism activity type
• perceived pleasure
• perceived professionalism
• hedonia
• eudaimoni

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://slovakia.travel/en.

2 https://www.visittheusa.com.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72174213; 71974206) and the Key Project of Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation (No. 2024JJ3034).