Measures the three core positive emotions tourists experience at a destination: Joy (happiness and elation during the visit), Love (warmth and affection toward the place and its people), and Positive Surprise (pleasant astonishment at unexpected destination features). Grounded in Izard's discrete emotions framework. Emotional experience is a stronger predictor of destination loyalty than cognitive evaluation or satisfaction alone, and the DES outperforms general affect scales (PANAS) for destination-specific emotional responses.
Likert (1–5, strongly disagree to strongly agree)
Joy — positive high-activation emotion (Likert 1–7, not at all to extremely)
Love — warm affective feelings toward the destination
Positive Surprise — unexpected positive emotional response
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Three subscale scores. Joy is the strongest predictor of revisit intention; Love predicts place attachment; Positive Surprise is highest among first-time visitors. Validated across cruise, heritage, and city tourism contexts. Complements cognitive destination image scales — emotional experience mediates the image–loyalty relationship. Hosany & Witham (2010) developed the original DES; Hosany & Prayag (2013) is the primary validation paper.
Hosany, S., & Prayag, G. (2013). Measuring tourists' emotional experiences: Further validation of the destination emotion scale. Journal of Travel Research, 52(6), 645–657.
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