Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2019

A novel recommender system that supports tourists in choosing interesting and novel points of interests (POIs) is here presented. It can deal with situations where users’ data is scarce and there is no additional information about users apart from their past POIs visits. User behaviour is modelled by first clustering users with similar POIs visit trajectories and then learning a general user behaviour model, which is common to all the users in the same cluster, via Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). Finally, recommendations are generated by exploiting the learnt behavioural models. The analysis of the produced clusters of trajectories and the generated recommendation shows that the proposed approach outperforms a baseline kNN model along several dimensions except precision.

Characterising types of travellers can serve as a foundation for tourism recommender systems. This paper presents an approach to identify traveller types by analysing check-in data from location-based social networks. 33 million Foursquare check-ins from 266,909 users are segmented into 23,340 foreign trips based on traveller mobility patterns. Hierarchical clustering was then applied to identify distinct groups of trips by features such as travel duration, number of countries visited, radius of gyration, and the distance from home. The results revealed four clusters of trips, which manifest a novel grouping of people’s travel behaviour.

Although the congestion of tourist spots has a huge effect on tourist experiences, few studies have discussed crowd information in the research field of recommender systems for tour planning. This study developed a recommender system that utilises crowd information interactively to support tour planning. The study created a bar graph about relative crowdedness in a day based on the idea that the measures required for a crowd vary depending on each tourist. This research conducted user experiments to examine how tourists are conscious of crowds. The proposed system can provide alternative plans in 70% of cases when tourists wish to visit a spot when it is not crowded. Furthermore, the results imply the importance of focusing on differences in tourists with regard to a sightseeing spot. The sightseeing experiences of tourists may be enhanced by conducting expectation management for sightseeing using ICT.

Rating-based summary statistics have become ubiquitous, and of key relevance to compare offers on booking platforms. Largely left unexplored, however, is the issue to what extent the descriptives of rating distributions influence the decision making of online consumers. In this work a conjoint experiment was eye-tracked to explore how different attributes of these rating summarisations, such as the mean rating value, the bimodality of the ratings distribution as well as the overall number of ratings impact users’ decision making. Furthermore, participants’ maximising behavioural tendencies were analysed. Depending on their scores on Decision Difficulty, participants were guided by different patterns in their assessment of the characteristics of rating summarisations, and in the intensity of their exploration of different choice options.

Sharing/platform economy takes place when users offer products and services through online platforms. In the case of tourism, the terms collaborative tourism and sharing (peer-to-peer) accommodations are commonly used. Since providing services through online platforms can be done by anyone without specific qualifications, it has been stated that the sharing economy is accessible to everyone who has goods to share or spare time available. Although this is true from a generic perspective, not all available offers receive the same attention from consumers. This research uses a dataset with all the properties offered in Spain on Airbnb to analyse differences in prices, demand, and guest satisfaction. It considers factors including neighbourhoods, and on whether the host is an amateur or a professional. The research also analyses the contents of user complaints. Results show that the platform economy is less egalitarian than some discourses about this economy suggest.

The sharing economy rapidly led to changes within the travel accommodation service industry over the last decade. Because of these changes, reviews are becoming more and more important. Reviews are particularly useful for peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms, as they reflect past experience from other customers and, in most cases, they are the only source of information available. Since customers take these reviews into consideration in their travel planning, understanding the composition of customer experience and feelings in the rating process is essential. Literature shows that there are different consequences of emotionality expressed in reviews. Thus, this paper explores the relationship between different lodging aspects and their roles in the formation of emotional content in reviews. This is achieved by exploring emotional expressions in reviews to reveal which criteria evoke which kind of emotions. In this way, a more precise customer sentiment understanding is derived. The findings provide a new angle on investigating customer behaviour.

The aim of this study was to explore UK residents’ opinions of how peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation listings within their communities impact upon their quality of life (QoL). Seven hundred and eighty open-ended questions were collected across the UK and content analysis was conducted to investigate the textual data. It is found that 13% of UK residents held positive opinion on P2P accommodation whereas another 13% expressed negative attitude and the rest kept neutral opinions. More people believed P2P accommodation brought positive economic and negative environmental impacts on the QoL, while the social influence was neutral. Opinions of London residents on P2P accommodation are different from those of non-London residents. Practical implications are provided to policymakers based on the empirical findings.

The rapid emergence of Airbnb in Switzerland is at the origin of this study. The main objective of this work is to describe the development of Airbnb’s offer in Switzerland in terms of temporal and geographical evolution. In addition, the study aims to understand Airbnb’s relative weight compared to the traditional hotel sector and its professionalisation. An analysis at the municipality level gives evidence of a positive link between the Airbnb supply and the tourism intensity of regions. The supply of beds by Airbnb and traditional commercial hotels are the variables under study in this context. As a result, this research highlights the fact that Airbnb mainly reinforces supply in rural tourist regions and large and medium-sized cities, leading to competition with a high hotel supply rather than an expansion of supply in regions where hotel supply is relatively low.

The mental image potential visitors have of a destination is a critical factor when making travel decisions. Research has shown that destination image formation correlates with users’ involvement with a device or platform, such as virtual reality (VR). While the impact of VR on the formation of a destination image has only received limited attention, literature suggests that the use of VR could have a positive influence on destination image. This study set out to examine the impact of VR on the formation of a destination image in comparison to an identical video viewed on a computer. An experiment with a post-user survey was conducted. The analysis confirms that the higher levels of involvement through using VR goggles do have a positive correlation with destination image formation. For destination marketing, this study suggests VR as a tool to positively influence the image of a destination.

360-degree videos offer great tourism marketing opportunities. Compared to traditional videos, 360-degree videos offer more compelling imagery of potential travel destinations, a “try before you buy” experience. These 360-degree videos can be viewed with various devices, including tablet and VR (Virtual Reality) goggles. The study, conducted at Helsinki-Vantaa airport, comprised 221 international tourists given VR glasses or iPads to watch a 360-degree video and answer a survey. The results reveal that the VR glasses and the iPad tablet had similar effects on travel intentions and behaviours. However, the viewing experience differs depending on the device. These findings suggest that some 360-videos will actually perform better on a tablet than with VR glasses. Tourism businesses and destinations should develop different content and situations for different devices. This study contributes to media richness theory and helps us to understand VR content as a type of rich media.

Social media and the power of word-of-mouth (WOM) have resulted in the rise of user-generated content (UGC) which thereby created prominent users who have congregated their own clout of followers as opinion leaders of the new digital century – social media influencers (SMIs). Becoming an integral player in the marketing industry in Singapore, Destinations Management/Marketing Organisations (DMOs) are recognising the influential power of SMIs, employing them as part of its integrated marketing strategy to increase inbound tourism. However, effectiveness of SMI marketing, even more so, social media campaign of a DMO has been minimally examined. Thus, to evaluate the effectiveness of the SMI marketing campaign executed by Hokkaido Tourism Organization, factor analysis and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is used. This study suggests that SMI marketing is effective in changing attitude among consumers, especially on destination image, which would consequently affect the consumers’ travel intention and intention to do word-of-mouth.

This paper considers if, and to what extent, visual social media can change the viewer’s perceived image of a tourism destination as well as which types of visual content are most effective in projecting a destination image. The results from an online survey, which compares three different test groups and their image of Mexico City, shows that UGC images from Instagram, as well as random Google images, are more effective at improving destination image than the UGC images reposted by a DMO. Additionally, this study uses image annotations to determine which features in images are most important in terms of their contribution to an improvement in overall destination image, presenting a re-usable set of visual features for future work on using annotations in the measurement of visual destination image.

In recent years there has been a tremendous growth of user-generated content. In the travel, tourism and hospitality fields, travel blogs, and later online travel reviews (OTRs), have proliferated. Many researchers have taken advantage of this abundant, spontaneous and freely accessible information source and have analysed OTRs to extract insights about attractions, hotels and restaurants to improve management and marketing policies. OTRs are tourist destination image (TDI) formation agents because they show the image perceived (and transmitted) by visitors and are consulted by prospective tourists. This research proposes a conceptual and methodological framework to analyse and measure TDI from textual and paratextual elements in OTRs. The model was applied on a random sample of a million OTRs (200,000 on Things to Do, 300,000 on Hotels, and 500,000 on Restaurants) written in English, between 2013 and 2017, by visitors of the Canary Islands.

In the field of destination branding, some researchers have conducted comparative studies for the development of the customer-based brand equity measurement. Since brand equity is a relative measure, it is required to compare a brand to another to measure its effectiveness. However, the selection process of destinations for the comparison has been highly depending on the subjectivity of researchers. This study proposes to use of online travel reviews to identify a pair of similar destinations addressing what tourists have talked about the destinations by aiming at contributing to developing a reliable brand equity measurement. The study takes Okinawa (Japan) as a case in the destination brand category of “island resort destination”, and the result indicates that Corsica (France) is the most similar destination among nine European destinations. Future research should develop scale items and test the reliability and the validity of them using the two destinations identified in this study.

This paper showcases an exploratory study of the creation of a travel diary to facilitate the expression and reminiscences of memorable and meaningful moments using the traveller’s digital footprints. Currently, personal technologies are widely used to capture these moments and the travel diary seems to be an ideal place to consolidate footprints from diverse sources. In this study, the researcher interviewed participants, asked them to share their memorable and meaningful travel experiences, and then instructed them to use their photos to create a paper-based visual diary. This study adopted a Labovian approach to compare the oral narratives with the visual diaries. Based on the results, the researcher makes recommendations regarding the future design of travel diary platforms.

With the ICT proliferation and related issues that follow people in everyday lives, commitment to digital well-being is becoming a preoccupation of technology providers as well as of users. As a form of a defence mechanism, the practices of so-called “mindfulness”, as a process of bringing a certain quality of attention to moment-by-moment experiences, are becoming an important tool for achieving well-being in digitally led-lives, from work to leisure activities. While technology providers are already offering some generic solutions, the answer of traditional hospitality industry is still missing. However, mindfulness practices within holiday resorts, as places that provide hedonic and regenerative experiences, represent a good ground for guests to reflect on their ICT dependence. To this end, this paper offers a discussion on the inputs for the co-creation of mindful experiences in holiday resorts that could lead to improved digital well-being of guests.

Live-streaming has become popular worldwide as digital solutions provide ever creative opportunities to bring activities in life that were previously impossible. Travel is one of the most favourable activities on live-streaming. Live-streaming tourism (LST) recognised as a distinct information and communication technology (ICT) phenomenon. However, research in LST remains under-explored. This study sheds light on live-streaming tourism, to develop a systematic review on live-streaming tourism, and propose the blended tourism experiencescape model to address the absence of live-streaming tourism from a theoretical perspective. The future research directions and agenda are also provided.

Although self-service kiosks are prevalent in banks and airports, their presence in hotels is far behind. Understanding what hotels can do with self-service technology (SST) can offer valuable references for hoteliers and remedy the academic void regarding hotels’ application of SST. Thereby, this research conducted four focus group discussions followed by fifteen in-depth interviews to explore the potential opportunities and how hotels would be held back when applying SST, based on Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory (TACT). The findings revealed that by applying SSTs, hotels can save cost, increase efficiency, improve hotel image and enhance customer experience. Self-service technology constraints consist of decreasing customer-to-hotel communication, requiring the ability of customer, and failing to satisfy customer needs. The availability of affordances and constraints are dynamic and related to the interaction between SSTs and hotels. The conceptual framework enriches the knowledge of SSTs and provides supports for TACT.

This research investigates the ways in which customers of tourism and hospitality facilities view the appropriateness of robots in tourism-related industries. From a global sample with over 87 countries and territories represented and over 1,000 respondents, the findings illustrate that the most commonly approved of usage of robots is perceived to be information provision, housekeeping activities and processing bookings, payments and documents. Multiple regression analyses suggest that many different dimensions of robot application influence how willing potential customers are to use robots in a hospitality setting, while the best indicator of willingness to use a robot in a hospitality setting is a person’s general attitude towards robots.

While robots have been used extensively for many years in manufacturing, many robots are fairly new arrivals in tourism-related industries. This paper delves into how the general public and stakeholders in the travel, tourism and hospitality industries view the incorporation of robots into tourism-related industries. Based upon a sample of over 1,000 respondents to an international online survey, it analyses which tasks are deemed as most appropriate for being delegated to a robot. In addition, it segments the respondents to determine whether the professions of those responding view the delegation of tasks to robots differently. The results indicate that in general, the occupation of respondents did not seem to play a significant role in perceptions of which tasks are most appropriate for robots in tourism-related industries, although respondents employed in robotics seem to be more receptive towards robots, while tourism educators – more pessimistic.

Hotel booking platforms using different approaches to implement dynamic pricing. Past research was focusing on basic factors of dynamic pricing like time of the booking, quotas, or length of stay management. Approaches using new variables for price determination were not considered in research so far. This research paper is focussing on the advanced dynamic pricing systems of hotel booking platforms in Europe, which are currently implemented as well as under development. Applying a case study research approach, the paper reveals a scientific overview about the current status-quo and the upcoming trends of different dynamic pricing concepts for hotel booking platforms in Europe. First, the understanding of dynamic pricing and its concepts in Tourism and Hospitality are clarified – theoretically, practically as well as in terms of customer behaviour. Following this, new advanced method still under development are investigated. Therefore, opportunities and challenges are shown up and discussed.

The link between information privacy concerns and privacy behaviours has been a focus of extensive investigation in various disciplines. However, little attention has been devoted to this issue in the tourism literature. Spurred by technological development and shaped by tourism-related environments, emerging privacy issues call for comprehensive yet context-specific studies to ensure tourists are making beneficial privacy choices. This paper first presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research on privacy concerns and behaviours. Then, it suggests a list of overarching research priorities, merging social and technical aspects of privacy protection approaches as they apply to tourism. The priorities include research to measure tourists’ privacy concerns, explore specific biases in tourists’ privacy decisions, experiment with privacy nudges, and explore how to integrate privacy nudges in system design. Thus, this paper contributes to guiding the direction of future research on privacy protection in tourism.

Although Nepal has tremendous tourism opportunities, the small and medium tourism enterprises (SMTEs) that constitute the largest percentage of tourism service providers, are lagging behind in e-Tourism adoption. This research conducts a comprehensive analysis of existing literature to propose an e-Tourism adoption model based on the Technology-Organisation-Environment and e-Readiness models. This model is supported by empirical data using qualitative in-depth interviews with seven key stakeholders and quantitative survey with 198 SMTEs. An operational model is outlined to identify the barriers and motivators for e-Tourism adoption in Nepal. Implications of this model for key stakeholders such as the government, tourism organisations and tourism associations are discussed. As Nepal moves to a federal political structure, the findings and recommendation from this research are expected to help policy makers, tourism associations and SMTEs to develop specific e-Tourism based programs in order to provide superior services to tourists.

Trust-free and trust-regulated systems based on blockchain technology (BCT) are currently experiencing the maximum hype and promise to revolutionise entire domains. Tourism products (intangible services) are highly dependent on trust and reputation management that is traditionally centralised and delegated to “expected” reliable third-parties (e.g., TripAdvisor). Although BCT has only recently started approaching the tourism industry and being employed in real-world applications, the scientific community has already been extensively exploring the promises of BCT. Therefore, there is an impending need for organising and understanding current knowledge and formalise societal, scientific, and technological challenges of applying BCT in the tourism industry. This paper moves the first step, presenting a systematic scientific literature review of studies involving BCT for tourism purposes. Providing a comprehensive overview, actors, assumptions, requirements, strengths, and limitations characterising the state of the art are analysed. Finally, advantages and future challenges of applying BCT in the tourism area are discussed.

Writing style is an important rhetorical feature of textual information. However, its value has not yet been well understood within the context of social media. This research compares two major aspects of textual content, i.e., content and style, to determine the information value of online hotel reviews. Using TripAdvisor hotel reviews, several machine learning techniques based on natural language processing (NLP) are applied to predict review helpfulness. The results indicate that textual features are core features of online reviews; that style is a more influential aspect than content; and, that combining both features produces the best results. This study contributes to the understanding of user-generated content in the textual format within the hospitality and tourism contexts. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

A WeChat mini program is an application that users can use without downloading and installing. After it was officially released in 2017, many travel enterprises have launched their own mini programs. This study applies affordance theory to investigate the role of WeChat mini programs in tourism activities through social network analysis using Rstudio. The authors searched for the topic “how do you perceive travel related WeChat mini program”, 200 comments were crawled and 180 comments were analysed after data cleaning. Results show that travel-related WeChat mini programs play a very important role in Chinese social network tourism activities. Moreover, the results suggest how the affordance theory has to be applied to the usage of WeChat mini programs.

Social media have become essential for firms in the hospitality industry to promote their brands, generate engagement and create sales. Using Facebook more than any other social media, hotels mobilise Facebook pages as platforms for communicating, interacting and networking with customers and potential guests, as well as for providing adequate content to consumers as an essential component of users’ overall satisfaction. The aim of the study was to analyse the message strategy that hotels in different hotel classes use in content related to services offered by individual firms compared to content related to the destination. A total of 4,725 Facebook posts by hotels in Barcelona were analysed, and compositional data analysis was applied to account for the relative importance of different data (i.e. proportions of different types of content). Findings show that higher-class hotels promote themselves by highlighting their facilities, whereas lower-class hotels promote themselves by promoting the destination.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have a great potential to aid not only in promoting tourism products and services, but also in influencing responsible travel behaviour to support sustainability. The effectiveness of using AI for positive behaviour change interventions depends on consumers’ attitudes toward AI. This study found three underlying views of AI impacts: Beneficial AI, Destructive AI, and Risky AI. Based on these, three consumer segments were identified: The Laggards, The Aficionados, and The Realists. The first two segments hold opposing views: the former averaging higher in negative impacts, while the latter in positive impacts of AI. The Realists are aware of both benefits and risks of AI. These segments differ in their intention to follow recommendations from AI. It is suggested that mainstream consumers, those belonging to The Realists, are likely to respond positively to AI systems recommending responsible behaviour, signifying the positive role of AI in sustainable tourism.

The role of digital social innovation (DSI) factors linking socially responsible business climate to sustainable performance outcomes in hospitality and tourism businesses has been understudied. This paper introduces digital social innovation within the theoretical framework of relationships between organizational responsibility and sustainable business performance. Using Churchill’s (1979) recommended approach for measurement scale development, the study reports preliminary scale purification results of DSI measures. The paper is among the first contributions to hospitality and tourism scholarship which explore conceptualization, measurement and application of DSI. Implications and next steps for the wider research study on responsibility-DSI-sustainability are presented.

The actuality of the double gender gap, that confirms the under-representation in both decision-making and technological positions, has been hardly analysed in the tourism industry. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify women’s position in top management positions in some of the most important tourism-high technological organisations and to evaluate these organisations’ actions towards the improvement of women’s participation. The analysis combines NASDAQ corporation data with content analysis on annual reports and corporate websites. Results confirm a low participation of women in NASDAQ tourism-technology board of director’s corporations and companies increasing steps towards women incorporation in decision making positions. Results show that though there are important disparities among organisations, there is a direct relationship between the implementation of specific programs to increase women’s participation in the organisation’s decisions and the percentage of women on Board of Directors, the highest decision-making level.

Research has not investigated the use of competitions-hackathons as a citizen engagement tool to motivate and activate citizen’s engagement in entrepreneurship driving sustainable tourism development. This paper fills in this gap by using the SHARE Challenge as a case study. SHARE is a competition-based crowdsourcing project launched by the Government of South Australia aiming to engage citizens in sharing economy entrepreneurial ventures. The competition received 88 eligible ideas from different stakeholders, and the study conducted a content analyses of these ideas for investigating the profile of the citizens and the type of the sharing economy ideas that were inspired by the SHARE. Tourism was found to be the sector attracting most of the submitted ideas for starting-up a sharing economy entrepreneurial venture aiming to make sustainable use of tourism resources. The findings provide evidence on how SHARE has ‘educated’, inspired, and activated the citizens to engage in sustainable entrepreneurship.

While hospitality has been one of the industries that have been keen to adopt and use various technologies, the proliferation of gamification application is still to materialise. It is therefore very interesting to investigate the potential benefits of gamified applications for both demand and supply in the area of the hospitality industry by identifying the motives of individuals’ when they use a hotel-gamified application. Since fun has become the requirement to ensure continuous demands for many products or services, companies and organizations feel the need to involve fun in their offerings to secure continuity in consumption and use. Hence, this study aims to understand the meaning of fun for individuals when they will use a hotel-gamified application. Visual material was prepared so the interviewees would have an idea of how a hotel-gamified application would look if it were in existence today based on the current definitions of gamification.

This study explored the extent to which the antecedents (psychological anxiety, behavioural anxiety, need for virtual comfort and security, and need for disconnectedness) impact smartphone usage while traveling, and the extent to which smartphone usage impacts travel efficacy and experience. Structural equation modelling was employed to analyse the data collected through a structured questionnaire from 227 Indian Millennials. The findings suggest that the need for virtual comfort & security and behavioural anxiety positive influence smartphone use while traveling, while psychological anxiety, and need for disconnectedness were found to have no significant impact. Further, smartphone use while traveling was found to have a strong impact on the travel efficacy and experience of users.

In an increasingly digitised and globalised world, a new type of business tourism has emerged, undertaken by the digital nomad (DN). Tourism operators and government agencies are increasingly seeking to attract DNs. Yet, knowledge about DNs is often based on reports that focus on glamorous aspects of the DN lifestyle whilst glossing over the negative realities of DN lifestyles. This study addresses this gap by adopting a retrospective autoethnographical approach that provides a more holistic understanding of DN life. The study collects and critically reflects on a vast amount of data related to various events and observations associated with the lead researcher’s experience of living as a DN. Sans gloss, the study’s findings reveal the characteristic motivations, mobility and work practices of DNs, discusses the implications of DNs for tourism practitioners that seek to attract DNs, and recommends future areas of research.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test a model that examines the roles of offline activities and customer value creation on tourists’ continuance use of online travel communities (OTCs). Hypotheses were tested through a sample of 251 respondents on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). SmartPLS structural equation modelling was used to test the structural model. Results indicated that offline activities significantly influence hedonic and social values, while this support was not found with functional value. Similarly, while offline activities positively influence continuance usage intention, no positive relationship was established between offline activities and recommendation intention. Additionally, the three dimensions of customer value creation positively influenced continuance usage intention. This study suggests that in planning offline activities, managers of OTCs must understand the dynamics of customer value creation in order to enhance social bonds among members and continuous usage of the OTC.