Digital performances, emotions, willingness-to-pay and to-donate in Amusement Parks

Amusement parks stimulate emotions and emotions turn into willingness to pay and to donate by visitors and stakeholders like corporate sponsors of edutainment and education programs. The pandemic was ‘an opportunity’ for park employees to strengthen their relations with absent visitors and stakeholders thanks to digitization and social media management. According to economic and neuromarketing literature, the aim of the paper is to estimate the sustainability of a sample of Italian Amusement Parks through and out of the pandemic and according to their accounting rows, above all, program service revenue depending on the marketing and IT (Information Technology) expense, the personnel expense and private contributions. These rows demonstrate results of emotions turning into economic willignesses, revenue accounting and financial performances. They can give evidence, thanks to the expense accounting, of employees, who are committed to marketing and, above all, to social media, which can maintain absent visitors’ emotions, while emotions turn into willingness-to-pay. Private contributions are philanthropy, which can be connected with emotions for advocacy, employees call from private stakeholders together with their willingness-to-donate. The analysis includes a k-means clustering, which separates the investigated sample into three groups with different performances in 2019, 2021 (the pandemic full year) and 2022.