Enhancing exercise visitors’ behavioral engagement through gamified experiences: A spatial approach

Abstract

“Quantified” travelers often use mobile exercise apps and gamified features to manage their physical activities while visiting destinations. Accordingly, this study empirically explores the spatially varying relationships between visitors' gamified experiences—place curiosity and social recognition—and exercise behavioral engagement. Using novel data from exercise app users’ activity logs and spatial analytical methods, this study finds that gamified experiences have differential effects on the exercise times and distance of tourist and resident visitors. Furthermore, the visitor gamification-engagement relationship varies according to the type of gamified experience and individual and clustered locations. These findings offer important implications for integrating gamified exercise apps with destination management to improve visitor engagement, which enhances our knowledge of smart tourism design.