HOLIDAY ATTACHMENT: THE CONSTRUCT AND ITS MEASUREMENT

Given that it is not the individual components constituting a holiday in isolation or in simple additive relationship that determines tourists’ sense of satisfaction with that holiday, the absence of an instrument to capture the effect of the holiday experience in its entirety is but odd. Not only that, the current approach of inferring the whole complex of holiday experience as the simple additive sum of the knowledge of its constituent parts is epistemologically problematic, too. Beginning with a brief inventorying of the current approaches to the measurement of place attachment, which is being used by researchers to assess tourists’ attachment to holiday destinations, the present paper attempts to develop a more holistic instrument, Holiday Attachment, which can comprehensively measure tourists’ attachment with the composite holiday experience. The holiday attachment instrument has successfully demonstrated the essential tests of validity and reliability. The paper is concluded with a brief discussion of the current limitations and the developmental dimensions of the instrument, as well as its implications and potential applications.