Abstract
As competition intensifies, value co-creation with tourists is essential for successful implementation of mobile augmented reality (AR) heritage applications. This study therefore aims to identify heritage tourists’ needs and involvement when developing mobile AR heritage applications using a grounded theory approach. Since AR applications are still in their infancy in the tourism industry the grounded theory approach was employed. Fifty in-depth interviews were conducted in Macau’s World Heritage Sites. The interview transcripts were analyzed by the open coding method with the NVivo software, the process of axial coding and the selective coding method. This study generated new requirements for mobile AR heritage applications that reflect the needs of the Asian tourist market, which are different from those of the European tourist market. The characteristic of tourist empowerment and the association between co-creation and tourism were also identified. This study contributes to provide a theoretical framework for designing mobile AR heritage applications and has implications for mobile AR application developers and tourism practitioners.
Highlights
Among the four types of tourist empowerment, which type is needed for developing mobile augmented reality (AR) heritage applications? This study explores the type of tourist empowerment in conducting value co-creation with tourists for developing mobile AR
As Roser and Samson [42] insisted that the ‘value co-creation’ occurs whenever tourists interact with developers and thereby has an important role in forming their experience, the generated theme indicates that the mobile AR heritage applications for
Mobile AR heritage applications are still deemed in their infancy in the tourism industry [3]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. World Heritage Sites (WHSs) with outstanding universal values tend to gain public attention, resulting in congestion. According to Mok [1], the congestion of WHSs causes negative reactions in heritage tourists. Enhancing the quality of experience of heritage tourists is the most challenging aspect in heritage tourism. In order to solve the issue, previous studies [2,3,4,5,6] have revealed that technology can be used
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