Leisure travel and life satisfaction

This is a Registered Report Stage 1 Manuscript submitted to Personality Science. Date of in-principal acceptance: 2022-05-18.

The rate of leisure travel has increased substantially within the last five decades. People spend resources on leisure travel because they expect vacations to enrich and improve their lives. However, evidence for the long-term association between life satisfaction (LS) and leisure travel is mixed, in part because of methodological limitations in previous research. In this study, we will examine the longitudinal association between LS and leisure travel in data from a representative Dutch sample that were gathered annually over 12 years. We expect that travelers will have higher levels of LS and higher growth in LS over time than non-travelers. Among travelers, we expect more frequent travel and international (versus domestic) travel to be associated with higher LS and greater LS growth.