Which Moments Matter? Heuristics of Remembered Travel Experience in Public Transport

TL;DR

This study identifies that travelers' remembered satisfaction of public transport journeys is best predicted by the worst experience and the final moment, emphasizing the importance of negative and ending moments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the minimum-end heuristic, combining the worst and final experiences, best explains retrospective travel satisfaction, challenging the mean experience assumption.

Findings

Minimum-end heuristic predicts satisfaction better than other models.

Negative moments and trip endings independently influence remembered evaluations.

Interventions targeting negative and final moments could improve satisfaction.

Abstract

Understanding how travelers form overall evaluations of public transport journeys is critical for improving travel satisfaction and encouraging sustainable mode choice. While travel satisfaction is discussed to influence attitudes and future behavior, the cognitive rules by which moment-to-moment experiences are aggregated into retrospective evaluations remain poorly understood in transport research. Drawing on psychological theories of experienced and remembered utility, this study investigates which temporal aggregation heuristics best predict post-trip travel satisfaction. Using a smartphone-based experience sampling approach, we collected high-frequency on-trip experience ratings and post-trip evaluations for 2576 real-world public transport trips across three German cities. Travel experience was assessed every five minutes during trips using a multi-item scale, allowing direct comparison of competing aggregation rules, including mean experience, peak-end, minimum-end, final moment, and trip duration. Multilevel regression models were estimated to evaluate the explanatory power of each heuristic. Results show that retrospective travel satisfaction is best predicted by a Minimum-End heuristic, combining the most negative moment of the journey and the final experience. Models based on mean experience, peak-end rules, final moment alone, or trip duration performed substantially worse. This pattern indicates that both negative extremes and the final phase of a journey independently contribute to remembered evaluations, rather than overall satisfaction reflecting an average of momentary experiences. The results have important implications for theory and practice, suggesting that targeted interventions at critical negative moments and at trip endings may yield substantial improvements in remembered satisfaction and, ultimately, support shifts toward sustainable mobility.