Dominant tourist satisfaction measures, typically tied to service quality, have recently received much criticism by senior tourism academics (Ryan, 1995; Kozak, 2001; Pearce, 2005). These prominent tourism scholars commonly refer to very similar problems of these measures: the unnecessary and inappropriate focus on expectations as a major influence on tourist satisfaction; the inability of service quality scales to adequately measure gaps between service expectations and performance; the lack of attention to immediate conscious satisfaction; the inability of the approaches to shed light on travel meaning; and the inability to explain the emotional dimension of tourist satisfaction.

The purpose here is to present a fresh tourist satisfaction approach which does not have these problems. Instead of service quality, this fresh approach views satisfaction in terms of happiness and quality of life. Overall happiness is said to depend much on satisfaction in different life domains (Glatzer, 2000), one of which is leisure travel.