Stakeholder engagement in the design of scenarios of technology-enhanced tourism services
Highlights
► Present scenario-based design as a useful tool for tourism destination stakeholders. ► Provides a case study on scenario-based design for digitally-enhanced city tourism. ► Assesses collaboration issues in stakeholder engagement.
Introduction
Tourism is becoming increasingly mediated by digital technology. This started with the SABRE reservations system in the 1960s (Copeland, Mason, & McKenney, 1995) and subsequent systems to assist booking agents, followed by computer-based and web services for tourists (such as Lonely Planet3 and Trip Advisor4), personalised guides offering audio (Tallon, 2008), interactive multimedia (Proctor & Burton, 2004) and context-aware adaptation (Abowd et al., 1997). The parallel trends have been towards developing interactive online services, personalisation of the tourism experience, and social sharing of visiting information.
Visitors now expect an integrated tourism product that enables them to know what is available at a destination, book travel, accommodation and visitor attractions, find relevant information before and during the trip, capture and share experiences, and view souvenirs of the visit. Developing such an integrated system requires a deep level of understanding of different tourist needs in respect to technology-enabled destination experiences that necessitate a high degree of stakeholder collaboration. The importance of stakeholder collaboration in tourism has been detailed in many previous studies, however there are few that have addressed these issues in the context of product innovation. Our aim with this study was to ‘engineer’ a collaborative environment for tourism stakeholders in which they could contribute to ideas for an integrated tourism service, based on scenarios. This was achieved through a method called Scenario-Based Design (SBD) (Carroll, 1995). This process revealed the potential for SBD to overcome some of the barriers and challenges to stakeholder engagement and collaboration identified in the literature. Our aim with this paper is to show, through a case study approach, how SBD can be used to engage diverse stakeholders in new service developments.
The paper addresses the need and opportunity for introducing digital technology into tourism experiences. We first outline applications of digital technology in destinations to provide tourist services that are immediate, personal and social. This is followed by a discussion of the literature on stakeholder engagement and collaboration in tourism, focusing on barriers and challenges to collaboration, which have been highlighted as a critical issue in destination competitiveness. We then describe theory and applications of SBD, a method first developed for development of human-centred software systems. A case study is presented on how SBD was applied to engage city tourism stakeholders in collaborative design of technology-enabled tourist services. The case study involved the development of ‘envisioning’ materials based on the Experian Robin Hood Nottingham Marathon, semi-structured interviews undertaken with a small sample of key tourism stakeholders in Nottingham (a medium-sized city in the centre of the UK), and a half-day workshop event involving a wider range of tourism stakeholders. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of scenarios in the development of integrated, technology-enhanced tourism services.
Section snippets
Digital technology for tourism experiences
The introduction of personal, social and contextual technologies for tourism began in 1952, with short-wave radio providing Ambulatory Lectures to personal receivers carried by visitors to the Stedelijk Museum (Tallon, 2008). This was followed in the 1970s by audio recordings on Sony Walkman devices, and in the 1990s by digital location-aware guides (Abowd et al., 1997) that provided audio and visual media based on the position of the visitor.
Abowd and colleagues propose four digital services
Stakeholder engagement through scenario development
Technology is developing at a rapid pace and consequently the level of adoption of new technology into businesses is variable and dependent on numerous factors. Thus not all stakeholders involved in city destinations are aware of emerging technologies and their application to tourist experiences. The use of scenario development was aimed at highlighting the opportunities for new forms of visitor experience presented by mobile digital and context aware computing. The context for this study was
The value of scenarios in stakeholder collaboration
The value of using a scenario-based process to engage diverse tourism stakeholders was focused on its usefulness as a bridge between different stakeholders; its potentiality in helping to overcome perceived barriers to collaboration; and as a research and development tool that connected the public and private sector stakeholders and the knowledge-based academic community.
Firstly, SBD was useful in that it acted as a bridge between the designers (academics working in the cross-disciplinary
Conclusions
SBD is a useful and novel approach that can be used to engage diverse tourism stakeholders in a new collaboration based on product development or innovation, in this case particularly useful in overcoming knowledge barriers surrounding digital technology, and to generate new interest in future engagement. SBD offers opportunity for further studies in tourism and potential use as an effective method for deepening and refining stakeholder involvement in tourism destination product design. In an
Acknowledgements
This work was funded by the RCUK’s Horizon Digital Economy Research Hub grant, EP/G065802/1.
Scott McCabe is Associate Professor of Tourism Management/Marketing at Nottingham University Business School. His research interests are in marketing communications, destination marketing, and sociology of tourism.
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Scott McCabe is Associate Professor of Tourism Management/Marketing at Nottingham University Business School. His research interests are in marketing communications, destination marketing, and sociology of tourism.
Mike Sharples is Professor of Educational Technology in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University, UK. Hics research involves human-centred design of new technologies for learning.
Clare Foster is Lecturer in Tourism at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster. Her research areas are tourist consumer behaviour, tourist complaints and satisfaction and tourism in everyday life.