Emotional wellbeing in intercity travel: Factors affecting passengers' long-distance travel moods

The travel mood perception can significantly affect passengers' mental health and their overall emotional wellbeing when taking transport services, especially in long-distance intercity travels. To explore the key factors influencing intercity travel moods, a field survey was conducted in Xi'an to collect passengers' individual habits, travel characteristics, moods, and weather conditions. Travel mood was defined using the 5-Likert scale, based on degrees of happiness, panic, anxiety, and tiredness. A support vector machine (SVM) and ordered logit model were used in tandem for determinant identification and exploring their respective influences on travel moods. The results showed that gender, age, occupation, personal monthly income, car ownership, external temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, air quality index, visibility, travel purposes, intercity travel mode, and intercity travel time were all salient influential variables. Specifically, intercity travel mode ranked the first in affecting panic and anxiety (38 and 39% importance, respectively); whereas occupation was the most important factor affecting happiness (23% importance). Moreover, temperature appeared as the most important influencing factor of tiredness (22% importance). These findings help better understand the emotional health of passengers in long-distance travel in China.