1. Abstract
The Memorable Tourism Experience Scale (MTE) is a standardized psychometric instrument developed by Jong-Hyeong Kim, J. R. Brent Ritchie, and Bryan McCormick (2012) to assess the multifaceted dimensions of tourism experiences that are stored in long-term episodic memory and subsequently retrieved to influence consumer behavioral intentions. Grounded in cognitive psychology, experience economy literature, and consumer behavior theories, the MTE scale operationalizes memorability across seven core experiential dimensions: Hedonism, Novelty, Local Culture, Refreshment, Meaningfulness, Involvement, and Knowledge. The finalized instrument comprises 24 self-report items administered via a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (I have not experienced at all) to 7 (I have experienced very much).
The scale was developed following the rigorous psychometric scale-development paradigm articulated by Gilbert A. Churchill Jr. (1979). From an initial pool of 84 candidate items derived from a comprehensive literature review and qualitative interviews with 62 subjects, the instrument was purified through item-to-total correlations, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Psychometric validation was performed on split calibration (n = 200) and validation (n = 200) subsamples drawn from an initial cohort of 511 respondents, demonstrating robust construct validity, high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from .75 to .88 across subscales), composite reliability, convergent validity (average variance extracted ≥ .50), and discriminant validity. By shifting the paradigm from transactional destination service quality and transient customer satisfaction to durable autobiographical memory retention, the MTE scale serves as a predictive framework for post-trip destination loyalty, behavioral intention, and word-of-mouth advocacy.
2. Keywords
Memorable Tourism Experience Scale, MTE, Tourism Psychology, Episodic Memory, Destination Loyalty, Hedonism, Novelty, Perceived Refreshment, Cross-Cultural Interaction, Psychometrics
3. Authors
The scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by a team of prominent scholars in tourism management, leisure behavior, and consumer research:
- Jong-Hyeong Kim, Ph.D.: Professor and lead researcher in hospitality and tourism management, recognized for pioneering work on the cognitive components of tourist memorability and post-trip affective outcomes.
- J. R. Brent Ritchie, Ph.D.: Late Emeritus Professor of Tourism Management at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. A foundational figure in tourism scholarship, Dr. Ritchie made seminal contributions to destination competitiveness, branding, and experiential travel frameworks.
- Bryan McCormick, Ph.D.: Professor in the Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, specializing in psychosocial dimensions of leisure, community recreation, and mental well-being.
4. Purpose
The conceptualization and construction of the Memorable Tourism Experience Scale arose from a recognized theoretical and managerial impasse within tourism and hospitality studies. For decades, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and consumer researchers relied almost exclusively on evaluative metrics such as service quality (SERVQUAL), overall customer satisfaction, and perceived value. While these constructs capture immediate transactional appraisals of an itinerary, they exhibit limited predictive validity regarding long-term post-travel behavioral outcomes, including sustained destination advocacy, word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations, and repeat visitation decades after the initial trip.
Cognitive and evolutionary psychology demonstrate that human decision-making is not guided directly by real-time objective experiences, but rather by the selective, reconstructed memories of those experiences—a phenomenon known as the remembered self versus experiencing self dichotomy (Kahneman, 1999). The fundamental purpose of the MTE scale is to identify, isolate, and measure the specific qualitative attributes of travel that systematically crystallize into vivid, enduring, and positively valenced autobiographical memory traces.
In applied destination management and hospitality marketing, the MTE scale allows researchers and practitioners to audit experiential assets across cultural heritage sites, eco-resorts, theme parks, and urban destinations. By benchmarking which experiential components (e.g., local cultural immersion versus novelty or personal involvement) are functioning effectively, destination managers can allocate capital toward experiential touchpoints that generate memorable cognitive retention. In empirical psychological research, the instrument provides an empirically validated, multidimensional framework for modeling the antecedents of subjective well-being, eudaimonic growth, psychological flourishing, and life satisfaction induced through non-routine, cross-cultural mobility.
5. Psychological Construct
The MTE scale operationalizes the psychological construct of a Memorable Tourism Experience, defined conceptually as a tourism experience positively comprehended and recalled from memory after the event has occurred. The construct is inherently multidimensional, comprising seven interrelated yet functionally distinct psychological domains:
Hedonism
Hedonism refers to the direct sensory indulgence, affective excitement, and positive emotional arousal elicited during travel. Rooted in hedonic psychology, this dimension captures the pursuit of joy, stimulation, and psychological gratification. Tourists experiencing high hedonism report feeling thrilled, deeply indulged in activities, and emotionally energized. For example, a traveler participating in a vibrant festival or indulging in fine regional gastronomy registers heightened emotional valence, which acts as a neurochemical catalyst for hippocampal memory consolidation.
Novelty
Novelty represents the psychological sense of newness, rarity, and unlikeness to prior lived experiences. Drawing from perceptual curiosity and human orienting responses, novelty reflects encounters that break established cognitive schemata. Encounters characterized as “once-in-a-lifetime,” “unique,” or fundamentally divergent from standard routines trigger dopaminergic learning pathways, cementing events into episodic memory due to high information distinctiveness and cognitive salience.
Local Culture
The Local Culture dimension reflects interpersonal encounters and meaningful communion with the host community and its cultural heritage. It captures both the perceived friendliness of local residents and the opportunity for deep, immersive cultural engagement rather than superficial, spectator-oriented tourism. This dimension emphasizes authentic cross-cultural interaction, fostering emotional empathy, mutual respect, and relational memories that remain distinct over time.
Refreshment
Refreshment measures restorative psychological states characterized by a sense of liberation, psychological escape, tension release, and revitalization. Conceptualized alongside Attention Restoration Theory (ART), this dimension measures the alleviation of directed mental fatigue and daily occupational stress. Tourists experiencing high refreshment feel liberated from rigid institutional roles, enjoying autonomy, inner calm, and cognitive replenishment.
Meaningfulness
Meaningfulness operationalizes eudaimonic outcomes of travel, encompassing personal growth, value reorientation, self-reflection, and self-discovery. In contrast to purely hedonic gratification, meaningfulness involves doing something deemed personally consequential, gaining existential insight, and broadening personal perspectives. Memories of this nature tend to become integrated into an individual’s ongoing self-narrative, securing enduring long-term retention.
Involvement
Involvement reflects the degree of personal relevance, intrinsic motivation, and absorptive engagement an individual invests in a destination and its activities. Grounded in ego-involvement theory, this dimension captures tourists who pursue activities aligned with their core personal interests or long-standing bucket-list aspirations. When tourists actively seek out destinations that resonate with their self-identity, their cognitive processing increases, amplifying the depth of cognitive encoding.
Knowledge
Knowledge pertains to intellectual, informational, and cross-cultural learning gained throughout travel. It operationalizes epistemic curiosity and the acquisition of new factual, historical, or practical insights. Experiencing exploratory environments, learning unfamiliar traditions, and gaining new skills satisfy the human drive for competence and mastery, generating structured cognitive frameworks that facilitate vivid retrospective recall.
6. Theoretical Framework
The theoretical architecture of the MTE scale integrates principles from cognitive psychology, human memory models, leisure science, and modern consumer experiential theory:
Tulving’s Episodic Memory and Autobiographical Memory Systems
At its cognitive foundation, the scale relies on Endel Tulving’s (1972, 2002) conceptualization of episodic memory—the neurocognitive capacity to consciously re-experience past events situated within specific temporal and spatial contexts. Unlike semantic memory, which stores impersonal conceptual facts, episodic memory involves autonoetic consciousness, allowing individuals to mentally travel back in time and mentally replay sensory, affective, and cognitive impressions. Events that involve peak affective states (hedonism, refreshment), schema incongruity (novelty), and self-relevance (meaningfulness, involvement) receive privileged memory consolidation in long-term autobiographical storage (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).
Pine and Gilmore’s Experience Economy Paradigm
From an applied economic and marketing standpoint, the MTE operationalizes B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore’s (1998, 1999) Experience Economy framework. Pine and Gilmore posited that economic value progresses from commodities to goods, services, and ultimately to staged experiences that leave indelible personal impressions. The MTE dimensions align directly with their four experiential realms: aesthetic (refreshment, local culture), educational (knowledge), escapist (involvement, refreshment), and entertainment (hedonism), operationalizing these constructs into a validated measurement tool.
Self-Determination Theory and Eudaimonic Well-Being
The inclusion of Meaningfulness and Knowledge aligns with Self-Determination Theory (SDT) formulated by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. SDT asserts that psychological flourishing requires the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy (liberation/refreshment), competence (knowledge/mastery), and relatedness (local cultural connection). When travel meets these fundamental needs, the experience fosters eudaimonic growth (Ryff, 1989), transforming transitory tourist consumption into meaningful life milestones.
7. Validity
The psychometric validation of the MTE scale was conducted through sequential empirical phases ensuring construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive/nomological validity:
Construct and Content Validity
Content validity was established through a literature review spanning travel behavior, consumer psychology, and sociology, combined with qualitative interviews conducted with 62 adult travelers. An initial pool of 84 items was reviewed by a panel of academic tourism experts to evaluate semantic clarity, face validity, and construct coverage. Items showing low inter-rater agreement or redundancy were eliminated, yielding an initial psychometric set of candidate items.
Convergent Validity
Convergent validity was evaluated across calibration and validation samples using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). All 24 standardized factor loadings were statistically significant (p < .001) and exceeded the conventional threshold of .60, with the majority surpassing .75. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for each of the seven latent constructs exceeded the recommended benchmark of .50 (ranging from .52 to .68), confirming that the variance explained by each latent factor exceeds associated measurement error.
Discriminant Validity
Discriminant validity was established using the Fornell and Larcker (1981) criterion. For each pair of latent constructs, the square root of the AVE exceeded the corresponding inter-construct correlation coefficients. Furthermore, chi-square difference testing between unconstrained models and nested models (where inter-factor correlations were fixed to 1.0) yielded statistically significant differences (Δχ² > 3.84, p < .001), demonstrating that the seven dimensions represent statistically distinct theoretical entities rather than a single undifferentiated experiential factor.
Predictive and Nomological Validity
Nomological validity was verified by modeling the direct effects of the seven MTE dimensions on downstream post-trip behavioral consequences, specifically behavioral intentions, revisit intent, and word-of-mouth recommendations. Structural equation modeling (SEM) confirmed that MTE dimensions, particularly Hedonism, Meaningfulness, Refreshment, and Local Culture, explained substantial variance in behavioral intention (R² values exceeding .45 in cross-validation cohorts). Subsequent replications across global tourism sectors have consistently confirmed the instrument’s predictive power for destination loyalty.
8. Reliability
The reliability of the MTE scale has been documented across its development and replication studies, showing high internal consistency and composite reliability:
Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)
In the original validation study by Kim, Ritchie, and McCormick (2012), Cronbach’s alpha (α) coefficients for the seven subscales comfortably exceeded the standard psychometric cutoff of .70:
- Hedonism (4 items): α = .84
- Novelty (4 items): α = .81
- Local Culture (3 items): α = .88
- Refreshment (4 items): α = .78
- Meaningfulness (3 items): α = .78
- Involvement (3 items): α = .75
- Knowledge (3 items): α = .83
The total scale internal consistency demonstrated an overall Cronbach’s alpha of α = .92, indicating high internal coherence across items without problematic item redundancy.
Composite Reliability (CR)
Composite reliability values for the seven latent constructs ranged from .76 to .88, satisfying the .70 threshold recommended for structural equation modeling (Hair et al., 2010). Furthermore, cross-cultural adaptations—including Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Portuguese validations—have confirmed stability in these coefficients, with subscale alphas consistently falling within the .74 to .91 range.
9. Factor Analysis
The structural composition of the MTE scale was refined using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic approaches:
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
An initial sample of 511 respondents who had completed an overnight pleasure trip within the preceding three months was collected. During initial item purification, corrected item-to-total correlations were calculated, and items exhibiting correlations below .40 were eliminated. Principal Axis Factoring with Oblique (Promax) rotation was conducted on the purified item set. Scree test inspection, eigenvalues exceeding 1.0, and factor interpretability clearly indicated a seven-factor solution that accounted for over 63% of the total variance, with no cross-loadings exceeding .35.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
To confirm the stability of the seven-factor structure, the dataset was split into an independent calibration sample (n = 200) and an independent cross-validation sample (n = 200). Maximum likelihood CFA yielded favorable model fit indices across both samples:
- Chi-Square to Degrees of Freedom Ratio (χ²/df): 1.68 (calibration), 1.74 (validation) — well below the accepted upper threshold of 3.0.
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .94 (calibration), .93 (validation) — meeting the > .90 target.
- Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .93 (calibration), .92 (validation).
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .058 (90% CI [.049, .068]), within the < .08 threshold for acceptable model fit.
- Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .052, reflecting low residual correlation.
A second-order hierarchical model (where a single higher-order Memorable Tourism Experience factor accounts for the seven first-order dimensions) was also tested and achieved acceptable fit, supporting the operationalization of the MTE scale as both a seven-dimensional profile and a composite global memorability index.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Instrument Type: Multidimensional Self-Report Rating Scale.
- Target Population: Adult leisure travelers, domestic and international tourists, and recreational event attendees.
- Administration Format: Available in paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted (web/online), and mobile survey formats.
- Completion Time: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes.
- Item Count: 24 items grouped into 7 distinct dimensions:
- Hedonism (Items 1–4)
- Novelty (Items 5–8)
- Local Culture (Items 9–11)
- Refreshment (Items 12–15)
- Meaningfulness (Items 16–18)
- Involvement (Items 19–21)
- Knowledge (Items 22–24)
- Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = I have not experienced at all, 7 = I have experienced very much).
- Scoring Protocol: Dimension scores are calculated by averaging the items within each factor (sum of raw scores within factor divided by number of items). Higher scores indicate greater experiential memorability within that dimension. A global MTE score can also be derived by averaging all 24 items.
- Reverse-Scored Items: None; all 24 items are positively keyed.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Memorable Tourism Experience Scale was published in 2012 in the Journal of Travel Research by authors Jong-Hyeong Kim, J. R. Brent Ritchie, and Bryan McCormick. The copyright is held by the authors and the publisher, SAGE Publications.
The scale is widely accessible for academic, non-commercial educational, and scientific research purposes without royalty fees under standard fair-use scholarly provisions, provided appropriate attribution and bibliographic citation are given to the seminal 2012 publication. For commercial applications, diagnostic deployment in proprietary market research, or inclusion within fee-charging commercial software platforms, permission should be secured through the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) or directly via SAGE Publications.
12. References
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