Emotional intelligence and emotional solidarity: the missing links between visitors’ personality traits and transformative travel experiences

This study investigates how tourists’ Big Five personality traits influence emotional intelligence, emotional solidarity with residents, and transformative travel experiences. Understanding these relationships is important because transformative experiences increasingly contribute to visitor satisfaction and destination competitiveness. Data were collected from 419 international visitors to Fiji using self-administered questionnaires. Results show that tourists’ personality traits shape their emotion-related capabilities, which in turn influence perceptions of welcoming nature, emotional closeness, and sympathetic understanding with residents. These dimensions of emotional solidarity are positively associated with transformative travel experiences. The study is among the first to integrate personality traits, emotional intelligence, emotional solidarity, and transformative experiences within a single framework, demonstrating how stable individual characteristics translate into in-destination relational outcomes. The findings extend theory on tourist transformation and provide practical guidance for designing more meaningful visitor-resident interactions and transformative destination experiences.