Commercial fi lms are important for deciding where to travel. Nonetheless, surprisingly little is known scienti fi cally about which emotions tourist commercials trigger while watching them and how similarly or differently online vs. post hoc self-reported emotions affect travel intentions. In an experimental study, 142 tourists were randomly allocated into one of three groups. The fi rst group was exposed to a tourist commercial fi lm, the second group watched a different tourist commercial fi lm and the third group saw a short amateur ski fi lm. A subsample was also shown a popular comedy fi lm. Online emotions were captured using FaceReader software that analyzed facial expressions. Self- reported emotions were measured with a questionnaire distributed immediately after each fi lm. Results showed that tourist fi lms elicited hardly any facial expressions at all, and that there was no correlation between those elicited and the same emotions measured with the post- fi lm questionnaire. In contrast, the comedy fi lm elicited higher levels of facial expressions and many of those emotions correlated signi fi cantly with those reported in the questionnaire afterwards. Finally, online more than self-reported emotions predicted future intentions to visit