The emotional responses in an art craft and heritage museum: Profiling visitors and understanding visitor satisfaction.

Tourists are increasingly seeking to satisfy their cultural needs, which is leading to a growing demand for more engaging experiences in heritage tourism. This study investigated whether visitors’ emotional engagement and experiences at an art crafts museum could be used to profile them. The ultimate goal, following the digitalization of the collection, is to develop an app that enhances the visitor’s experience. A survey was conducted with 218 visitors (113 females) who completed a questionnaire at the end of the visit. A two-step cluster analysis based on visitors’ emotions and engagement identified three distinct segments, while regression analyses explored predictors of overall visit satisfaction. The following typologies resulted from cluster profiling based on motivations for visiting, background variables such as prior experience with handcrafts and museums, and sociodemographic variables: ‘Explorers’: visitors with lower emotional involvement and a dominant educational motivation; ‘Committed Competent’: tourists, passionate about handcrafts and mainly motivated by interest in the area and its culture; ‘Experience Seekers’: highly emotionally involved tourists who are satisfied with their visit and mainly motivated by sightseeing. The findings provide simple and easy-to-implement insights for identifying visitor profiles at the museum entrance and for developing an app that can provide personalized tour recommendations.