What attracts tourists to their holiday destinations? That’s an easy one, you might say. The sights! The history! The food and wine! Would we be drawn to Paris if it didn’t have the Eiffel Tower, the literary and artistic heritage or the croissants? Rome if didn’t boast the Colosseum, the Caesars or the pasta?

Maybe not. But a new Australian study suggests that there’s another force at play as well, influencing us when we sit down at our computer to book our next overseas jaunt: our perception of a country’s happiness.

Swinburne University of Technology researchers Dr Reza Tajaddini, Dr Hassan Gholipour and Dr Jeremy Nguyen studied the relationship between perceived happiness, inbound tourism and tourism revenue in 63 countries, with their findings recently published in the Annals of Tourism Research. Their work has important implications for tourism marketing worldwide, they said.

To define happiness, the Swinburne team used the World Values Survey, a global research project that explores international values and beliefs. Comparing tourist arrivals in a given country against survey data relating to happiness, they found that tourists preferred to travel to – and spend more time and money in – happier countries.

“Happier countries may be able to attain economic benefits by recognising population happiness as an intangible asset that can be managed and marketed,” Dr Gholipour said.

Some countries have already caught onto this, putting the supposed happiness of their people front and centre in their tourism campaigns. Tourism Fiji’s “Fiji: Where Happiness Finds You” is only the most obvious example.

“In recent years, many countries have launched tourism campaigns focusing on happiness in their countries,” Dr Tajaddini said, citing Bhutan, Thailand and Costa Rica alongside the Fijian example.

“For most tourists, it’s not just the sights and the weather,” Dr Nguyen added. “It’s also the mood of the people around you.”

But some may cock an eyebrow at the potential destinations the researchers said were happiest. Mexico and Colombia – the former wracked by an ongoing drug war and the latter by an ongoing anti-government insurgency – both somehow made it onto the list. Qatar, where the happiness of the migrant workers building the FIFA World Cup stadiums almost certainly wasn’t considered, and Uzbekistan, which Freedom House describes as one of the most repressive countries in the world, also got rather questionable guernseys. Maybe hold off on buying those tickets.

Australia’s high ranking makes a little more sense. Earlier this year, on a different list, the country was similarly named one of the world’s happiest.

The World Happiness Report, prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, ranked Australia the 9th happiest country in the world after Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand – all perfectly nice places to visit compared to the researchers’ suggestions, with the threat of, you know, death at the hands of drug cartels or rebels all comparatively low.

All that remains is to see whether Tourism Australia – which persists with campaigns emphasising the country’s natural beauty, though recently the natural beauty in question has been that of Chris Hemsworth – will take the researchers’ message on board and start emphasising how positively tickled we are to live here instead.