The impact of life adversity on destination preference

In periods characterised by pandemics, personal loss, or political upheaval, individuals often experience deep feelings of powerlessness. However, little is known about how such negative life events and the resulting powerlessness influence tourism destination preferences. Across three studies utilizing survey (Study 1), experiment (Study 2), and recall task methodologies (Study 3), this paper shows that negative life events reduce preferences for new destinations by heightening feelings of powerlessness and, subsequently, triggering personal nostalgia. Furthermore, when individuals experience powerlessness in response to a temporally distant (vs. recent) negative life event, they demonstrate an even stronger preference for familiar rather than new destinations. By integrating cognitive appraisal and construal-level theories, this research extends current literature by explicitly identifying powerlessness and personal nostalgia as sequential mediators forming a dynamic psychological pathway from life adversity to consumer choice. Ultimately, our findings broaden the theoretical understanding of personal nostalgia tourism as an appraisal-based coping mechanism and offer actionable implications for managers, detailing how to position familiar destinations as psychological refuges and leverage familiar anchors when marketing novel destinations to powerless consumers.