Travel is not only a cost: How perceived travel benefits improve travel satisfaction?

Many studies have found that travel satisfaction is negatively affected by travel costs like time loss. However, individuals accept the travel cost only if they could receive more benefits from travel, such as conducting activities at the destination (i.e., derived benefit) and/or enjoying the travel itself (i.e., intrinsic benefit). Therefore, we argue that people jointly consider travel costs and benefits in travel evaluation. This paper aims to clarify the role of perceived intrinsic travel benefit in travel evaluation by investigating its direct effect as well as interaction effect with trave cost on commuting satisfaction for commuters by different modes, using data from a household travel survey conducted in 2018 in Shanghai, China. The results indicate that the perceived intrinsic travel benefit helps improve commuting satisfaction for all the commuters. However, perceived intrinsic travel benefit cannot improve the commuters’ tolerance to travel cost when rating commuting satisfaction. Instead, increased commuting time from past weakens the positive impact of perceived intrinsic travel benefit on commuting satisfaction for public transit commuters.