Mobile Tourism Research Articles

Perencanaan Strategis Sistem Informasi Menggunakan Metode Ward and Peppard (Studi Kasus: Dinas Pariwisata Kabupaten Timor Tengah Selatan)

The Timor Tengah Selatan Regency Tourism Office is one of the regional apparatus organizations that has the authority to implement the regional government's authority in the tourism sector. Information Technology Systems are factors that affect the sustainability of organization's activities. The Timor Tengah Selatan Regency Tourism Office still encounters obstacles in the application of information systems that do not support the entire business process and the lack of IS implementation makes performance inefficient. One of the contributing factors is that there are not enough human resources who have the skills in managing information systems and information technology properly. The purpose of this research is to develop a strategic planning of information systems in accordance with the needs of the organization. In the preparation of information systems strategic planning research using the Ward and Peppard approach with various analyzes such as SWOT analysis, Value Chain, and Mc. Farlan Strategic Grid. Based on the results of this study resulted in several recommendations to be carried out including the creation of Contract Making Administration System, and Mobile Tourism Information System and the development of Regency Tourism Website Timor Tengah Selatan regency, SIPD (Local Government Information System), and SIMDA (Regional Management Information System) GOODS.

THE USABILITY OF I-SUYYAH: A MOBILE TOURISM APPLICATION FOR ARAB TOURISTS IN MALAYSIA

Globalisation and the rapid growth of technologies call for ease and automation in different aspects, including in tourism. Tourism is an important sector in Malaysia as it generates income for the country. In recent years, Malaysia has seen a surge in the arrival of high-spending Arab tourists. This reflects the need to provide a tool, specifically a tourism mobile application in the Arabic language, that could help ease their journey in Malaysia. Thus, this study aims to determine the usability of the i-Suyyah mobile application for Arab tourists in Malaysia. The data obtained were analysed using the Fuzzy Delphi method, and twelve experts were selected to analyse the fuzziness consensus. It was found that the i-Suyyah mobile application recorded a high percentage of expert consensus, specifically on its usability. All usability items have reached unity with the threshold value of d 0.2, and the percentage of consensus among the expert group is more than 83%.

The Impacts of Self-Construal and Perceived Risk on Technology Readiness

This paper explores how different self-construals interact with perceived risk and influence tourism consumers’ technology readiness toward tourism mobile apps. The study used 284 tourist participants to show that tourism consumers, regardless of self-construal type, have a negative perception of technology readiness when they perceive a high level of risk. Furthermore, those with independent self-construal have a more positive perception of technology readiness than those with an interdependent self-construal when they perceive a low level of risk. The results also show that technology readiness mediates the relationship between self-construal and use intention toward mobile apps. Based on these results, we proposed the following practical implications. First, companies need to find and lower potential risks that can be perceived in tourism mobile apps. They must also deliver different messages according to consumers’ self-construal. Companies should provide independents with information related to the positive benefits obtained through the mobile app, and interdependents should be provided with information that reduces perceived losses.

Deep Learning-based Mobile Tourism Recommender System

A tourism recommendation system is a crucial solution to help tourists discover more diverse tourism destinations. A content-based approach in a recommender system can be an effective way of recommending items because it looks at the user's preference histories. For a cold-start problem in the tourism domain, where rating data or past access may not be found, we can treat the user's past-travel-photos as the histories data. Besides, the use of photos as an input makes the user experience seamless and more effortless. The current development in Artificial Intelligence-based services enable the possibilities to implement such experience. This research developed a Deep Learning-based mobile tourism recommender system that gives recommendations on local tourism destinations based on the user's favorite traveling photos. To provide a recommendation, we use cosine similarity to measure the similarity score between one's pictures and tourism destination's galleries through their label tag vectors. The label tag is inferred using an image classifier model that runs from a mobile user device through Tensorflow Lite. There are 40 label tags, which refer to local tourism destination categories, activities, and objects. The model is trained using state-of-the-art mobile deep learning architecture EfficientNet-Lite. We did several experiments and got an accuracy result of more than 85% on average, using EfficientNet-Lite as the base architecture. The implementation of the system as an Android application has been proved to give an excellent recommendation with Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) equals to 5%.

A business model adoption based on tourism innovation: Applying a gratification theory to mobile applications

The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of Tourism Innovation by using a Uses and Gratification Theory model to investigate tourist intention to visit a city after reading other users' valuations of the destination on Mobile Applications.The Uses and Gratification Theory (U&G) model was adapted to investigate the factors which influence tourist intention to visit a city. Satisfaction and Tourism Experience were added as external variables to the U&G model. The original Convenience construct for mobile tourism applications was changed to Mobile Convenience for this study.A survey was carried out to investigate the factors which influence tourist intention to visit a City. 261 users with different nationalities were asked about their experiences and feelings when using Runnin'City, which was the mobile tourism application used in this study. The results were analyzed with Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). All the relationships of U&G were supported, except for Information for Tourism Experience.Self-Expression was found to be especially relevant and was moderated by Entertainment, Information and Mobile Convenience which in turn influence Satisfaction, Tourism Experience and Intention to visit a City.The Gender and Running frequency variables were also investigated using multi-group analysis. The influence of Mobile Convenience on Satisfaction was seen to be moderated by Gender, and the relationships of Information and Entertainment on satisfaction are moderated by Running Frequency.The results obtained with the proposed changes in the U&G model will be very useful for academics and also for designers and developers of mobile tourism apps as they show the special role played by Self-Expression and Entertainment as relevant factors for the success of a mobile tourism app.

Is Architecture Connected with Intangible Cultural Heritage? Reflections from Architectural Digital Documentation and Interactive Application Design in Three Aegean Islands

The research project “Mouseion Topos” (in English: “Museums Place”), focusing on traditional local settlements situated at three Aegean islands, aims to contribute to the promotion of their physiognomy and intangible cultural heritage by connecting regional museums with each settlement. The present article, part of the project’s initial phase, via the application of the HERMeS methodology (version 1 and 2) and the development of the associate digital documentation tools, identifies and records the architectural and urban elements influenced by each settlement’s intangible cultural heritage as listed by UNESCO and presented by their corresponding museums. The research findings revealed connections between the museums’ content and the documented tangible heritage based on the formulated conceptual and heatmaps, which can be used at the early design stages of the current project’s interactive applications, especially in mobile tours. Finally, the research findings verify that despite the limitations and issues for further research, the introduced HERMeS methodology and digital tools are reliable and contribute to the respective field’s theory. The paper also provides beneficial deliberation on digital architectural heritage documentation methods and interactive technologies, highlighting points and areas of interest that the tourist industry, technology designers, museum curators, and architects can employ.

Tourism and mobile devices: provenance of academic research through a bibliometric study


 Purpose
 
 This paper aims to outline a map of all the research that exists on mobile technology and tourism archived in the two main databases worldwide (Web of Science and Scopus). Accordingly, with the identification of all the scientific articles that deal with both mobile technology and tourism, the authors seek to ascertain the evolution of mobile technology in the tourism sector through the years, countries, universities and authors and determine the various collaborations brought about between authors, universities, institutions and/or companies in various research projects. Finally, it also allows the authors to distinguish the main topics under study within the scope of ‘mobile tourism’.
 
 
 
 Design/methodology/approach
 
 A mixed methodology has been carried out. The search focused on the principal databases of bibliographic references and citations of periodical publications, such as articles from scientific journals, books and other types of printed material. Once the results were obtained in the respective databases, it was necessary to be able to work with them. In this respect, the authors had to extract the relevant data and dump it in a bibliographic reference manager, for which they chose Mendeley. After this, the tabulation of data was performed in Excel and tables and graphs were created from all the data collected.
 
 
 
 Findings
 
 The main results obtained and analyzed are the number of articles per year, countries and universities. In the same way, it is interesting to highlight the number of countries and universities that participate in each article under study. On the other hand, an analysis has been carried out regarding the number of articles per author, as well as the topics dealt with in the different articles.
 
 
 
 Originality/value
 
 This analysis reveals the role that has been played by mobile phones in tourism since the first scientific article was recorded in 2002. In this regard, in recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of articles, finally resulting in moderate figures in relation to countries (40) and universities (233) that have formed part of the subject matter under study. In contrast to other areas of research in tourism, the relevance of this subject is therefore evident, as is the need for greater background knowledge to establish research models adapted to the new reality of tourism in a world of ever-increasing mobility.
 

The Role of Social Crowdsourcing in Mobile Tourism

The Role of Social Crowdsourcing in Mobile Tourism

Analysing Tourism Application Using Information Technology Governance Trust Model in COVID-19 Pandemic Situation

At the beginning of 2020, Indonesia was shocked by the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the areas affected by the COVID-19 outbreak is tourism. In the tourism sector, the Indonesian government is closing tourism activities to minimize the transmission of the COVID-19 virus. The tourism sector has been a mainstay of income for tourism village communities and supports its foreign exchange earnings. This study analyzes local government tourism applications using IT governance trust (ITGT)in the COVID-19 pandemic situation. The method used is by distributing questionnaires to application makers and government employees who use tourist applications. Data were analyzed inferentially using quantitative Smart-PLS analysis. The application of multiple regression techniques to analyze questionnaire data on mobile tourism applications’ reliability and validity during the COVID-19 epidemic. This article used descriptive research to respond to the implementation of IT governance (ITG). The statistical results obtained indicate that the quality of information, system quality, and service quality of the tourism mobile application significantly affect user confidence in using tourism applications. Thus, this study contributes to recommendations for using the ITGT model to determine the extent to which tourism applications can prepare themselves to improve their tourism applications during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study provides direct information to practitioners about what to consider in enhancing tourist application features, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic situation, so there is a need for ITG in planning reliable tourism applications during the COVID-19 pandemic.

EFFICIENCY OF CREATIVE MOBILE APPLICATION TO PROMOTE TOURISM: CASE OF BANG NAM PHEUNG MARKET, SAMUT PARKAN PROVINCE

The extensive usage of smart phones and digital applications has changed the lifestyle, this trend has also affected tourism, it has transformed the tourism industry ways to access visitors during travelling. Mobile applications are used for different purpose in tourism from booking, mapping, finding locations and payments. Mobile application usage is very common in Thailand. Though, the drivers behind increased use of such applications in hospitality enterprises and markets in Samut Parkan province is still unidentified and imprecise. On the basis of Theory of Acceptance this paper is targeted to identify the factors that drives tourist’s continuous intention to use mobile application. A purposive sampling was instigated in restaurants, food stalls, souvenirs shops in Bang Nam Pheung Market, compiling 415 useful survey responses to check that how different drivers such as personal innovation, awareness and destination infrastructure risk impact continuous intention to use mobile application. This study also examined the moderation effect of information knowledge on interconnection among Mobile applications drivers and tourist intention to uses the mobile applications. This study is offering several helpful points and recommendations for tourism organizations and government to effectively incorporate mobile application. Mobile application developers can also refer to this paper.

Mobile Payment Enhancing Tourism in Emerging Markets: A Qualitative Study among Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in Rwanda’s Tourism Sector

ABSTRACT Technological advancement has fueled various new mobile payment (m-payment) services, which transform the payment industry and help develop established and newly created tourism businesses. However, in emerging markets, users who adopt m-payment services are rare – slowing down the tourism sector’s development. In this paper, taking a multi-stakeholder theoretical perspective on technology adoption, we examine the company-, customer- and country-level drivers and consequences of adopting m-payment services among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Rwandan tourism sector. Our analysis leads to recommendations for m-payment services as levers of tourism sector growth and welfare in emerging countries.

An Experiment to Discover Usability Guidelines for Designing Mobile Tourist Apps

Tourist apps can be very useful for sightseeing, and this is one of the reasons that makes them so numerous in app stores. Good usability can make the difference when choosing an app, from the user’s point of view, so this study is aimed at analyzing and discovering common usability issues in apps for tourism. This paper presents a research study with two objectives: analyzing the most common usability problems in mobile apps for tourism and proposing recommendations for improving the usability of those apps. The research process firstly identifies the main functionalities that tourist guides should have, by filtering the results obtained through the store. This was followed by a two‐part experiment. The first part was a Keystroke Level Modelling analysis, where the number of taps needed to perform each main functionality in each tourist guide app was registered. Secondly, a heuristic evaluation was carried out on the best rated apps in the previous stage. Four usability experts tested the apps in real devices, by performing several tasks with a smartphone, and evaluated them according to some mobile heuristics. After this process, the most frequent usability problems in tourist guide apps were found, which allowed to discover recommendations for designing and developing mobile tourist guides. One of the recommendations is that tourist guide apps should provide at least the following functionalities: listing POIs (Points of Interest), showing information of a POI, selecting language, showing a map, working offline, and showing a tourist’s current location. Other recommendations proposed are, for example, showing relevant and complete information of POIs, such as opening hours and admission fees; showing more than one POI on the map and the distance to the tourist; and avoiding showing at the same time commercial information and tourist information.

Konsep Augmented Reality Sebagai Pengembangan Pemasaran Pariwisata dalam Menghadapi New Normal Masa Pandemi Covid-19

The use of technology today in various sectors of life is very high, this can also seen from the needs and improvements provided by this digital service. Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the organizations that builds and improves online information today. The Covid-19 pandemic had a considerable effect on the use of this technology with the imposition of large-scale physical distancing, this depends on various sectors that exist today, especially the tourism sector. Therefore, it has a big impact on tourism activities / activities, both on a national and international scale (foreign) who will visit tourist spots / destinations. Augmented Reality has various features that support in various fields, one of which is traveling. The scientific and theoretical studies in this study provide a useful reference source for developers of mobile AR applications, tourism managers, and effective marketing strategies in facing the new normal era today. So that tourism businesses or tourist destinations better understand user preferences for mobile AR applications and others that are able to maintain behavior can still enjoy travel with their impulsivity in the context of tourism as a result.

Mobile Application Design for Heritage Tourism Uses Gamification Approach in Indonesia

Heritage tourism is a trip traveling in certain areas that have historical value and ancestral heritage, such as temples, museums, palaces, etc. Indonesia is a country that has diverse historical heritages that have the potential to be developed be-cause there are historical sites and are considered as tourism potential. Technolo-gy plays a vital role in the development of heritage tourism to facilitate the deliv-ery of information to tourists, one of which is a mobile application. The proposed application design is a mobile application design with a gamification approach to facilitate tourists to obtain information and travel experiences to explore exciting tourist attractions. The gamification approach is used as a unique attraction where tourists are wrongly venturing for the concept of the game in conveying infor-mation using element games. This research was conducted in 3 temples, namely Gedongsongo temple, Prambanan temple, and Borobudur temple. The prototype design test was conducted on 100 tourists who visited 3 of the temple's tourist at-tractions. The results showed 86% of users agreed with the proposed prototype design. Based on the 95% confidence scale, shows that this research was suc-cessful in designing a prototype of a heritage tourism mobile application to ex-plore temple tourism. This application design is suitable for users based on four variables: Usefulness, Ease of Use, Ease of Learning, and Satisfaction.

Mobile landscapes and transport tourism: the visual experience of mobility during cruises and coach tours

PurposeThis study aims to analyze the visual aspects of transport tourists’ experience of mobility focusing on British cruise and coach tourists’ international travel experiences.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative data was collected using semi-structured in-depth interviews with coach and cruise tourists and analyzed using thematic analysis.FindingsThe visual experience of mobility (demonstrated in the paper by the example of cruises and coach tours) is critical in the formation of transport tourism experiences. The mobile tourist landscapes emerge from the interplay of the subjective experiences of particular modes of mobility (vehicle or vessel) and routes, whereby the two key visual elements are the changing scenery and views of everyday local life as experienced whilst traveling.Research limitations/implicationsThe present study focuses particularly on the visual elements of passive transport tourism experiences. It does not account for other tourist activities nor does it study the experiences associated with active transport tourism. Future research could perform a holistic analysis of tourists’ experiences of transport in all its forms.Practical implicationsThe findings point to the centrality of the experience of mobility in transport tourism experience. The following two key aspects of the experience emerged: the importance of variation of the scenery that the tourist consumes during their tour and a desire to observe mundane, everyday life elements of the destination, which should be taken into account by the tour operators and service providers in the route design and marketing.Originality/valueCoach and cruise tourism are rarely analyzed together; this study demonstrates considerable parallels between the two in considering them as transport tourism, a mode of recreational activity where mobility is the central part of the tourist experience and should, therefore, be considered a tourist attraction in and of itself.

Study on Customer Loyalty of Tourism Mobile E-commerce Platform—Taking Qunar as an Example

With the high popularity of the Internet and the good development of tourism, tourism mobile e-commerce platform emerged. Taking Qunar as the research object, this paper constructs a customer loyalty model of Qunar based on domestic and foreign literature. Through the empirical analysis of the data by SPSS22.0, it is concluded that ease of operation, interactivity, information accuracy, service timeliness, page aesthetics, low price and privacy protection have a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction has a significant positive impact on customer loyalty. It is suggested that Qunar should simplify the complexity of the operation process, optimize the aesthetics of the page, increase the level of price concessions, and improve the protection of personal privacy and other recommendations.

Single-valued neutrosophic linguistic reducible weighted MSM for tourism mobile e-commerce service quality evaluation

The tourism mobile e-commerce service quality evaluation (TMESQE) is of great concern to enterprises for enriching the service content of the enterprise and improving its market competitiveness. The key issue arises tremendous vagueness and reciprocity for TMESQE. The Maclaurin symmetric mean (MSM), as a vital information fusion tool, can capture the reciprocity among multiple given argument more effectually. Amount of weighted MSMs have been presented for dealing various neutrosophic information integration issues because the arguments are hourly interoperable. However, these kinds of weighted MSM (WMSM) operators are out of the reducibility or idempotency. To solve two above issues, we introduce the single-valued neutrosophic linguistic reducible WMSM (SVNLRWMSM) operator and the single-valued neutrosophic linguistic reducible weighted dual MSM (SVNLRWDMSM) operator. In the meantime, certain interesting properties and some special cases of developed operators are explored in detail. Whereafter, we develop two multiple attribute decision making (MADM) algorithms based on SVNLRWMSM and SVNLRWDMSM for dealing the TMESQE issue, along with the sensitivity analysis of various parameter values on final ordering. Conclusively, a comparison with some existing algorithms has been conducted for showing their availability.

Do tourism applications’ quality and user experience influence its acceptance by tourists?

The aim of the present study is to improve the understanding regarding the acceptance of tourism apps available for the marketing and tourism destination. For this purpose, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) was adapted to investigate the determinants of users’ behavioral intention for mobile tourism applications according to the quality and user experience of tourism applications. In order to understand whether the design of and user experience with tourist applications influence those apps’ use and acceptance, the variable Trust in the Internet operator was added to UTAUT2 as an external variable, as well as App Quality and App User Experience. To investigate the determinants of the users’ behavioral intention, a survey of 552 users was performed, and the data were analyzed using the partial least squares path modeling in Spain and Portugal. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of user needs when they decide whether to download a mobile tourism app and whether to use it at their destination.

Evaluating the Egyptian Official online channels for branding Egypt as a tourism destination

Websites, social media, and tourism mobile applications are now considered important online channels for promoting destinations' brand. The study employed content analysis technique to analyze the official Egyptian Tourism Website, social media tools and the mobile application linked to the website. The study used three analysis models to evaluate the features and the interactivity of the Egyptian online channels. Results show a strong need to develop the interactivity of the Egyptian website and its mobile application. The study demonstrated the need for more integrated social media tools to brand Egypt online as a tourism destination.

The Challenges of Smart Tourism: A Case of Bucharest

Abstract The advancement of technology makes smart devices and their applications ever more popular and complex. Tourism is an area where varied and numerous services are required, hence this diversity resulted in a multitude of smart applications and smart systems designed to enhance tourist‘s satisfaction. The present paper investigates the concept of Smart Tourism in the scientific literature and how it can be applied for mobile applications, with particular focus on the most popular Smart Tourism apps for Bucharest. Following the analysis of these apps according to the theoretical framework applied, recommendations for improvement of Bucharest Smart Tourism mobile applications are provided.