Travel Books Research Articles

From Gaming Elements to Purchase Intentions: The Influence of Perceived Enjoyment and Promotion Focus in Online Travel Bookings

This study examines the impact of gamification on purchase intentions in Malaysia's online travel booking industry. As traditional platforms like Expedia face declining bookings due to economic challenges and the rise of competitors such as Airbnb, Agoda, and Booking.com, understanding the role of gamification in user engagement becomes crucial. The research employs Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic gaming elements, perceived enjoyment, and promotional focus on purchase intention. A total of 141 respondents participated in the survey and the key findings reveal that extrinsic gaming elements, including points and rewards, have a significantly stronger impact on perceived enjoyment than intrinsic elements like membership levels. This heightened enjoyment, in turn, positively influences purchase intention. Additionally, the study finds that promotional focus moderates the relationship between perceived enjoyment and purchase intention, further enhancing the effect. The Importance-Performance Map Analysis (IPMA) indicates that while intrinsic gaming elements perform below average, they are less critical than other factors. Managers should prioritize improving aspects of high importance, but currently have, low performance to boost purchase intentions effectively. Overall, the research provides actionable insights for enhancing competitiveness in Malaysia's digital travel marketplace, emphasizing the need for targeted gamification strategies to align with evolving consumer preferences. The findings offer a foundation for developing strategies that can help travel platforms maintain relevance and drive engagement in a competitive landscape.

“Written upon the Stones”: Of the Cyclops, the Shamir and Other Legends of Origin in Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels

This paper examines legends on the origins (aetiologies) of places and placenames in Benjamin of Tudela’s travel account. Origin stories are prevalent in medieval travelogues, but Hebrew travel accounts employ a unique form that is embedded in placenames. Midrash Shem (מדרש שם), as this form is known in Jewish tradition, is the homiletical interpretation of names, typically characterized in some measure by wordplay. I suggest that these legends and placenames serve Hebrew travel literature both as an evidential tool and as an artistic means of expression, contributing to the construction of “known” and “foreign” lands and peoples, and consequently to the formulation of group identities. En route to the foreign and unknown, yet “own”, holy Eretz Yisrael, Benjamin of Tudela encounters Jewish communities and records a variety of aetiologies throughout the Middle East. In retelling the origins of the travelled landscape, he transmits local mythical, theological and historical content as well as particular Jewish-diasporic socio-political realities. Diversely told origins of Roman architecture, scattered across most of Benjamin’s account, show how these local traditions varied. Some aetiologies fuse traditional with foreign content to affirm a sense of belonging under foreign rule, while others actively undermine established non-Jewish narratives or even oppose competing Jewish narratives.

Die Donau als Lebensader in Harald Grills Reisebuch Hinter drei Sonnenaufgängen. Balkanstreifzüge durch Rumänien und Bulgarien bis Odessa (2018)

Abstract Harald Grill is a German author from Eastern Bavaria who predominantly writes poetry and travel books, as well as travel features for radio and television. He became known due to his project of a ‘returning home twice’, when he walked back on foot to his hometown of Regensburg, on the river Danube, two times, in 2000 starting from the North Cape, and in 2001 starting from Sicily. In 2015, he travelled to Southeastern Europe and wrote a book based upon the experiences and reflections during this voyage. In the following, it shall be demonstrated how the river Danube, to which Grill since his childhood has had close biographical ties, structures the text of this travel book and moreover serves as a medium of self-reflection and therapeutic remedy following the author’s loss of his mother.

Travel counsellors’ perspectives on AI assistance

Research on AI in the context of travel counselling has mainly focused on increasing the efficiency and level of automation of online travel bookings. However, AI solutions can also be used in the context of offline travel counselling, i.e., face-to-face counselling at a travel agency service desk. In this specific application domain, AI has the potential to change personal interaction between counsellors and clients in different ways. In order to design AI solutions to enrich personal interaction, research on the specific requirements of counsellors, customers, and other relevant stakeholders in the context of AI-assisted offline travel counselling is needed. Human-centered design (HCD) is a promising approach to investigate and incorporate these perspectives on the course of the AI design process. In this paper, we present our approach of applying HCD elements to deepen the understanding of the context of use, to specify user requirements, and to find potential design solutions for a real-world use case of AI assistance in offline travel counselling. In addition, we highlight the key findings and insights regarding travel counsellors’ perspectives and requirements on possible AI adoption, showing that they are primarily open to AI-based innovations, but also have some concerns about the devaluation of the counselling profession. Further, we critically discuss additional design elements that would be needed for human-centered AI design in an ambitious sense.Practical Relevance: The findings are of high practical relevance as they demonstrate how HCD principles can be applied to real-life use cases, which aim to introduce human-AI interaction in work domains. At the same time, our findings provide valuable insights for practitioners into the specific work environment of offline travel counsellors.

‘Welch eine Lage für die armen Frauen!’: Emilie von Berlepsch’s Travelogue Caledonia (1802–04) as a Medium of Reflection on the Role of Women

ABSTRACT Emilie von Berlepsch was the first German woman to travel to Scotland and write a travelogue about it. From 1799 to 1800 she toured the country and published her experiences and thoughts in her travel book Caledonia (1802–04). This article illustrates von Berlepsch’s endeavour to spread knowledge of British culture in her home country by means of the travelogue, with a particular focus on women. It argues that Caledonia can be considered a further example of von Berlepsch’s advocacy of women’s rights. Using the account of her voyage as a tool to reflect on the role of women both in Britain and Germany, von Berlepsch encourages her fellow countrywomen to increase their independence from men through intellectual pursuits such as writing.

John Paget s Memorandum: Hungary and Transylvania in 1836

From the renowned poet Lord Byron, who lost his life fighting for the Greeks during their War of Independence, to David Urquhart, one of the most prominent defenders of the Turks in Europe, many Englishmen volunteered for various causes throughout the 19th century. Among these individuals was John Paget, a member of an established English family. After meeting his future wife, the Hungarian Baroness Polixena Wesselényi, in Rome, Paget traveled extensively through Hungary and Transylvania before eventually settling in Transylvania, where he endeavored to contribute to the region's development. However, what keeps Paget's legacy alive in Hungary today is not his contributions to local development but rather his travelogue, Hungary and Transylvania, in which he documented his journeys between 1835 and 1837. The foundation of this work emerged in 1836 when Paget met Lord John Ponsonby, the British Ambassador to Istanbul; at Ponsonby’s request, Paget prepared a memorandum to provide the ambassador with updated insights on the lesser-known regions of the Austrian Empire. Notably, this memorandum included matters of particular interest to Ponsonby that were not addressed in his travel book. This study aims to transcribe Paget's memorandum, which holds significance for Hungarian history, and to elucidate the historical context in which it was composed. Keywords: John Paget, Hungary, Transylvania, Lord Ponsonby

VoiceBack: Design of Artificial Intelligence-Driven Voice-Based Feedback System for Customer-Agency Communication in Online Travel Services

Online travel booking has become increasingly popular; however, most travel websites do not yet offer voice interaction. This study introduces VoiceBack, an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven voice-based feedback system conceptualized to support both customers and online travel agencies during the booking process. It proposes a theoretically and empirically underpinned design concept that involves a voice user interface (VUI) for customer feedback. This feedback, collected by an AI agent, is analyzed and converted into actionable statistics, which are then presented to online travel agencies through a visual interface. The interface is designed to highlight problem areas and usability issues during the booking process. This study contributes to the field of human-centered AI, by offering insight into the complex process of designing and integrating voice, emotion, and feedback within user interfaces. This integrated approach can enrich the user experience of customers when booking travel online, and pave the way for more intuitive and responsive interaction designs in the future.

Influence of the Technology Acceptance Model on Customer Engagement

This study based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) investigated the influence of mobile application attributes on customer engagement with travel booking apps in China. Data were collected from 453 Chinese users of travel booking apps through an online questionnaire; descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data. The results showed that mobile app attributes such as perceived usefulness (β = 0.193, p < 0.001), relative price advantage (β = 0.253, p < 0.001) and interface design (β = 0.225, p < 0 .001) had a positive influence on consumer engagement with the travel app. Furthermore, app attributes including perceived usefulness (β = 0.246, p < 0.001), perceived ease of use (β = 0.245, p < 0.001), relative price advantage (β = 0.281, p < 0.001) and interface design (β = 0.209, p < 0.001) were positively and significantly associated with satisfaction. In addition, satisfaction (β = 0.204, p < 0.001) was found to positively influence customer engagement with the travel booking app. Finally, satisfaction played a mediating role in the relationship between app attributes and customer engagement. This study contributes to the TAM and travel booking application literature.

Свидетельства Джона Белла о князе Александре Бековиче-Черкасском и его походе в Хиву

The article examines two accounts dedicated to the Khivan campaign of Prince Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky, by the contemporary Scottish physician and diplomat John Bell. One of them was included in Bell’s book “Travels from St. Petersburg through Russia to Various Parts of Asia” (in Volume 1, containing the notes on the trip to Persia) published in 1763 and translated into Russian in 1776. Researchers have not widely known about the other account until now, as it is only contained in the unpublished (not even in English) manuscript entitled “Sundry Anecdotes of Peter the First,” preserved in the archives of the National Library of Scotland (Glasgow). Both texts are presented in the article in toto. The one from the travel book – in a new translation made especially for this article; the one from the collection of anecdotes about Peter the Great is pub-lished for the first time. A brief analysis is provided, involving documents and publications dedi-cated to this topic. The significance of these accounts lies in the fact that they belong to a person who was a contemporary to the event: J. Bell was in Persia when they occurred (it was there that the soldiers of Bekovich’s detachment who had escaped captivity managed to flee), and the major-ity of accounts of the event known in the literature were recorded and published half a century and more after the campaign.

Maximizing Rewards: An Evaluation of an Integrated App for Efficient Reward Manegement,Currency Transfer

Abstract– In an era marked by digital innovation and evolving consumer behaviors, the management of rewards, currency transfers, and travel bookings has become increasingly complex yet integral to modern lifestyles. This research paper examines the functionality and efficiency of an integrated app designed to streamline these processes, offering users a comprehensive solution for maximizing rewards and facilitating seamless transactions. Through a combination of literature review, methodology description, and functionality analysis, this study provides insights into the app’s capabilities in managing rewards, transferring currencies, booking flights, and handling vouchers within a single platform. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, including user surveys and interface evaluations, the research evaluates the app’s usability, effectiveness, and potential impact on user behaviors. Findings suggest that the app presents a promising solution for efficient reward management and travel planning, offering users tangible benefits such as cost savings and convenience. However, areas for improvement are identified, particularly in enhancing user experience and optimizing currency transfer mechanisms. This research contributes to the understanding of digital reward management systems and informs future developments in this rapidly evolving field. Keyword: Magnify , TypeScript , reactNative, Prisma

INDIA FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BIRUNI AND V.S. NAIPAUL

This study is based on a comparison of two works on India, one by Biruni, who lived and wrote about India nearly a thousand years ago, and one by V.S. Naipaul, who lived in the twenty-first century. The first work, Kitâb’ut-Tahkîk ma li’l-Hind, written by Biruni, was written in Arabic in the first quarter of the eleventh century to help Muslims living among Hindus in different regions such as Sindh, Punjab, Kabul and Ghazni. The work was edited by Edward Sachau in the early 1880s and translated into German (1883-1884) and English (1887-1888) under the title Al-Beruni’s India; both the Arabic edition and the translations were published in the West in those years. An Arabic edition of the book, based on the copy in the Paris National Library, was published in Hyderabad in 1958 with the help of the Indian Ministry of Education. On September 30, 1932, Kıvameddin Burslan translated the work into Turkish, but due to various reasons, it was published only in 2015. Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, on the other hand, has written three travel books on India and in these works, which are based on his travels to the country in 1964, 1977 and 1990, he refers to India as a dark, wounded and rebellious civilization respectively. With the publication of his books, Naipaul, himself of Hindu descent, was severely criticized for his views on India, Indians and non-Western societies and cultures, which went far beyond criticism, and caused intense debates. The most obvious conclusion that emerges from the comparative analysis of the works of both authors is that Biruni, despite being a Muslim, is extremely tolerant and objective in his approach to India, Hindu culture, traditions, and belief system, while Naipaul's approach, on the contrary, is far from tolerance and extremely biased.

“The Scepter Shall Not Depart from Judah”: Jews and Imperial Power in Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels

This paper, written as a final project for Professor Shay Rabineau's class “Walking the Land,” examines the relationship of medieval Jews to the imperial powers to which they were subject, as expressed in Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels. It focuses on the two imperial cores of Rome and Baghdad, and contextualizes the representation of these two cities within the world of imperial power in which the text was produced. As a work of medieval travel literature, I analyze the Book of Travels not as a factual account of history, but rather as a discursive and imaginative text which seeks to categorize and make comprehensible the world inhabited by medieval Jewry. I argue that the representations of imperial power and Jewish status in Rome and Baghdad on their face reflect a desire on the part of medieval Jews for respect, honor, and dignity from the non-Jewish rulers to whom they were subject. However—as can be gleaned from Benjamin of Tudela’s reproachful account of messianic claimant David Alroy—the glowing accounts of these twin imperial cores is also a way of encouraging Jews not to disrupt the delicate balance of power in their world. Ultimately, the Book of Travels portrays a complex matrix of Jewish attitudes towards imperial power, including aspiration, fear, and strategically-suppressed antagonism.

Зачем была написана "Книга путешествий" Джона Мандевиля?

The article is devoted to the “Travel Book” which was written by John Mandeville in the middle of the 14th century and remained extremely popular over the next few centuries. The author of the article describes the handwritten and the first-printed traditions of the existence of the “Book”, dwells on the circumstances of its origin, on the problem of its authorship and on the content of its two parts. Based on the analysis of numerous miracles, both quite real and fictional, which John Mandeville mentions while describing his adventures in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and distant exotic countries, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that the “Travel Book” was not a typical medieval travelogue, but it rather belonged to the genre of didactic literature. John Mandeville tried to teach his contemporaries a lesson about what it means to be a true Christian, how a person can approach the Lord and His plan for creating everything on earth, what ideas and values ру should share at the same time. In particular, Mandeville constantly returns to the idea of a new Crusade, which remained extremely popular in the middle of the 14th century, but he criticizes it on the grounds that Europeans should not plan to conquer foreign lands (even the Holy Land) without solving their own internal, primarily moral, problems.

The Perceptions of Bursa in the Travel Books: Examples of Fahrunnisa Hanım, Huseyin Vassaf, Hikmet Arif, Ahmet Hasim and Tanpınar

Gezilen yerleri etraflıca tanıma, bilgi toplama, okura söz konusu yerlerle ilgili rehberlik etme amacını güden seyahatname edebiyatın en eski türlerinden biridir. Bu tür, 19 ve 20. yüzyıllarda yaşanan gelişmeler dolayısıyla çok daha fazla önemli hâle gelmiştir. Yerli ve yabancı seyyahların dikkatini yüzlerce yıldır üzerine çeken Bursa’ya bu dönemlerde yapılan seyahatler ise ayrı bir değer taşır. Büyük yıkımların ve dönüşümlerin yaşandığı bu çağlarda Bursa’ya gelen yerli seyyahlar şehirde gezip gördüklerini yazıya geçirirlerken kendi zamanlarında şehrin alımlanma biçimlerine dair de örnek vermiş olurlar. Bu çalışma birbirlerine yakın dönemlerde gerçekleşmiş Fahrunnisa Hanım’ın Hüdavendigâr Vilayetinde Kısmen Bir Cevelan (1896), Hüseyin Vassaf’ın Bursa Hatırası (1896), Hikmet Arif’in Bursa Seyahati (1922) isimli eserleriyle Ahmet Haşim’in ‘Gurabahâne-i Laklakan’ (1923) ve Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın Beş Şehir’inde yer alan ‘Bursa’da Zaman’ (1946) denemeleri özelinde Bursa’nın alımlanış biçimlerine odaklanmıştır. Farklı bakış açılarına sahip bu seyyahların Bursa’ya yönelik algılarında görülen çeşitlilik ise hem seyyahların kişiliklerinin hem de devrin şartlarının zorunlu bir sonucudur. 1896-1946 aralığında yayımlanmış olan bu eserlerin birlikte ele alınmış olmaları, şehirde değişenin yalnızca insan ve insan ilişkileri olmadığını, mekânların da başka bir algıyla zihinlerde yeni baştan inşa edildiklerini ortaya çıkarması bakımından da kıymetlidir.

“Wouldn’t It Be Smarter to Let the Malay Colonize Europe?”: Postcolonial Critique, Antiglobalism, and Racism in the Travel Books of the Bohemian- German Author Richard Katz (1888–1968)

Abstract: The travel books of the Bohemian-German author Richard Katz (1888–1968) were once among the most popular publications in German literature but have since been forgotten. This essay intends to reread, from a postcolonial perspective, Katz’s work from the interwar period. It focuses on his book about the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, Heitere Tage mit braunen Menschen (1930), in order to explain how and why the early form of postcolonial and antiglobalist critique we find in Katz’s writings could coexist with other ideas that reiterated nineteenth-century colonialist and racist conceptions about the indigenous Other and people of mixed race. The latter is all the more intriguing considering that Katz himself, being Jewish, was soon to become the victim of a political ideology marked by ideas similar to some of the ones he defended when writing about Southeast Asia.

Postcolonial Rereadings and Transmission: Miroslav Šašek’s Travel Books

This article presents and compares first and more recent editions of Maurice Šašek’s book, This is Australia. Disappointingly, clichéd descriptions of both white and Indigenous Australians still remain in the ‘updated’ versions, and little attention is paid to Australia’s colonial origins.

Geo-political vampirism: how and why has Western literary scholarship appropriated and then re-mythologised the socio-historical origins of the vampire?

The article considers the claims of Western academics like Frayling (1992) that the literary vampire began with Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). Crawford (2016) identifies a German literary vampire tradition existing one hundred years before Polidori, yet that work has strengthened Eurocentric claims concerning the literary vampire by academics like Bloom (2018). The article reviews Anatol’s (2022) challenge to the dominant position of Dracula in vampire criticism, Anatol identifying a literary tradition pre-dating Stoker, that tradition seeing the documenting of Caribbean vampire folklore by British colonialists/slave owners, travel writers and journalists. In sympathy with Anatol’s non-Eurocentric consideration, the article re-examines/disputes Western academia’s ‘mythology’ concerning the Villa Diodati (1816), when Lord Byron’s reading from the German Fantasmagoriana apparently inspired Polidori and Mary Shelley to write their novels. The article identifies an Ottoman literary tradition that directly influenced Byron’s 1813 poem ‘The Giaour’, his unfinished story ‘A Fragment’ (1819), and Stoker’s Dracula. The article explores Ottoman vampire (‘obur’) literature, starting with Celebi’s Book of Travels of 1666, which refers back to the fifteenth century ‘vampire fatwas’ in the Balkans under Ottoman rule. The article traces how the dominant Turkic languages of the region informed the proto-Albanian language, the ‘vampire’ (as both term and demonised ‘other’) entering Albanian folklore. The Ottoman empire declining, the rising Austro-Hungarian and then British empires appropriated the vampire westward, exoticising and demonising non-central Europeans. Finally, the article provides a post-colonial reading of Southey’s 1801 orientalist poem Thalaba the Destroyer, reading the first true ‘vampire’ in English literature.

Robert Byron: An Iconoclast on the Road to Appreciation of Islamic Architecture

England in 1933 was a claustrophobic, desolate, and enervating country generating a generation of discontents like Robert Byron. Unsatisfied with the received ideas of Western aestheticism, he aligned himself with Islamic aestheticism and departed for Oxiana to study Islamic architecture resulting in his The Road to Oxiana, a masterpiece in travel writing. This study contends that Byron is an iconoclast who undermines the rhetoric of colonialism and imperialism in his travel book. To elaborate its analysis, the study employs Holland’s and Huggan’s idea of countertravel writing along with psychoanalysis. It argues that Byron’s countertravel writing in his narrative manifests in two ways. Firstly, when he critiques the reductive picture of Islamic architecture by exalting and appreciating its beauty, especially its Kufic inscriptions. Secondly, when he extols Gohar Shad, a renowned patroness of architecture by acquitting her of the orientalist charge and acknowledging her contributions to Islamic architecture. In doing so, he reveals that she is his ‘anima’ and archetypal mother.

The Architectonics of Karaliychev‘s Travel Books in the 1930s and 1940s

This article presents a study of Angel Karaliychev’s travel books during the second period of his development. For the first time in Bulgarian literary theory the focus lies on the interconnection and dialogism between the texts that the writer published in different collections and not so much on their contents. This article examines the special features of text composition so as to provide an explanation for the lack of unity and coherence between individual works. Special attention is paid to the only travel book in the writer’s oeuvre – “The Land of the Bulgarians” – which was published in five different editions.

Western Travellers Arriving in Turkestan in The Period before Russian Occupation and Their Travel Books as Sources for The History of Turkestan

Western Travellers Arriving in Turkestan in The Period before Russian Occupation and Their Travel Books as Sources for The History of Turkestan