Digital free tourism – An exploratory study of tourist motivations

The problem of technology overuse - and related mental health and addiction issues – has spilled over into the tourism context. Recent literature has also suggested that heavy use of technology while travelling could potentially have negative impacts on the overall tourist experience; and that tourists might search for “disconnection” while travelling. As a result, this study focuses on the recently emerged and scarcely understood phenomenon of “digital free tourism” (DFT), exploring participants' motivations for voluntarily abstaining from, or limiting their use of, technology on their travels. The findings aid relevant theory by identifying four main factors that motivate tourists to participate in DFT – escape, personal growth, health and well-being, relationships – and highlight several exploratory subthemes underlying these motivators. Considering DFT not as an inconvenience but a travel choice, this study can finally aid practitioners to better promote DFT as a tourism product; maximizing the participants’ related benefits and positive experiences.     

The lone digital tourism entrepreneur: Knowledge acquisition and collaborative transfer

This paper addresses calls for more detailed studies of small tourism enterprises. Researchers report a lack of adoption and ineffective utilisation of digital technologies in smaller tourism businesses. The study focuses on two university-facilitated projects of digital marketing adoption and utilisation by 53 small and medium sized tourism businesses in the South of England. The framework for this study was driven by Modes of Knowledge Transference and Technology-In-Practice. The findings describe peer-to-peer knowledge acquisition and sharing that take place in university-led projects and suggests that a combination of Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge helps entrepreneurs to advance their digital marketing knowledge. Peer-to-peer clusters are an effective means of placing digital marketing knowledge and technology in the context of small and medium tourism business practice. The paper provides implications for destination marketing organisations and policymakers and suggestions for future avenues of research are offered.     

Virtual reality: Applications and implications for tourism

Virtual reality (VR) offers tourism many useful applications that deserve greater attention from tourism researchers and professionals. As VR technology continues to evolve, the number and significance of such applications undoubtedly will increase. Planning and management, marketing, entertainment, education, accessibility, and heritage preservation are six areas of tourism in which VR may prove particularly valuable. Part of VR's possible utility as a preservation tool derives from its potential to create virtual experiences that tourists may accept as substitutes for real visitation to threatened sites. However, the acceptance of such substitutes will be determined by a tourist's attitudes toward authenticity and his or her motivations and constraints. As VR is further integrated into the tourism sector new questions and challenges clearly will emerge. The sector will benefit from future research into the topics that are discussed and numerous suggestions for future research are presented.     

Quality of virtual reality and its impacts on behavioral intention

Although virtual reality (VR) has received growing attention and been adopted as customer engagement and marketing tools in the hospitality and tourism industry, little research has been conducted in quality assessment of VR and its impact on customers’ psychological acceptance. Building upon the DeLone and McLean’s IS success model, this study identifies the quality factors of VR and examines their impacts on customers’ behavioral intention. This study develops a quality-driven VR framework and tests the proposed hypotheses assessing customers’ behavioral intentions. For the empirical analysis, this study recruits potential U.S. customers and asks them to browse a VR-based destination website and then to answer the online survey related to VR applications. The collected responses are analyzed by PLS-SEM. Findings suggest that content quality, system quality, and vividness positively influence customers’ attitude and telepresence, leading to their positive behavioral intention to visit the destination.     

Reviewing the Profile and Behaviour of Internet Users

SUMMARY

Despite the wide-spread discussion of e-commerce advantages, research of e-commerce business models in the tourism literature has, to date, focused primarily on organisational, business and technical factors. In contrast, social considerations, i.e., factors related to the general societal context influencing the shape and adoption of e-commerce models in practice, have not been adequately addressed. As the wide success of e-commerce heavily depends on its adoption by society, it is imperative to develop a better understanding of the profile and behaviour of Internet surfers and shoppers. Thus, robust research on the adoption of e-commerce needs to consider the societal issues/factors affecting people and their environment. In this vein, by reviewing a great amount of literature from different disciplines, this paper aims to develop a holistic perspective for examining online tourists by integrating the study of individual, organisational, industrial, societal, and technological aspects of e-business. By consolidating and synthesizing a great number of studies, the paper also aims to identify and discuss future research opportunities and directions aiming to further examine Internet users and their behaviour.     

An occupational hazard? Sex segregation in tourism employment

This article presents data from an exploratory study carried out over a 12 month period using qualitative research methods. The study tests theoretical concepts adapted from the model of the ‘vicious circles of job segregation’ (Collinson et al., Managing to Discriminate. Routledge, London, 1990) in the specific context of tourism organizations. It examines factors which contribute to the sex segregation of employment in selected tourism organizations, and the role of equal opportunities policies in resisting segregationary practices. The findings of this initial research conclude that participating tourism organizations rationalize job segregation in relation to the culture of tourism. In addition, the informality of internal recruitment systems serves to reproduce existing organizational structures. There is evidence to suggest that use of equal opportunities policies can provide one possible means of resistance to such segregation.     

Factors Affecting the Adoption of E-commerce for the Tourism Industry in Taiwan

The tourism industry has successfully pioneered the adoption of e-commerce with respect to its online trading systems. Given the potential for the tourism industry to impart knowledge to other industries, this study examines the acceptance of online trading systems for travel agencies in Taiwan. According to the results of a literature review, this study uses six critical factors that were identified in the literature review as formative influences on the adoption of e-commerce. These factors are then incorporated into a questionnaire designed to verify empirically the extent of their ability to be generalized. This survey reveals that 80% of the travel agencies in the sample have adopted online trading systems. Particularly noteworthy is how the adopters and non-adopters hold different viewpoints on the following factors; “compatibility of adopting innovative technology”, “centralization of organization”, “organizational scale” and “correctness of website transmission”.     

20 years of research on virtual reality and augmented reality in tourism context: A text-mining approach

Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have undergone technical evolutions over the last few decades including improvements in immersion and the feeling of telepresence. Several examples of the applications of such techniques can be found in stores, tourism, hotel, restaurants, and destinations. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of studies employing such techniques in tourism-related studies is difficult to find. The current study uses citation network analysis and text-mining techniques to conduct a full-text analysis of 56 journal papers and 325 conference proceedings related to VR and AR in the tourism context. This paper intends to (i) provide an overview of the VR and AR-related tourism studies network and discuss them over time, (ii) present the most important topics and studies emerging from this literature, (iii) suggest avenues for further research. Findings reveal 10 core topics in journal papers and 11 core topics in conference proceedings, which are presented together with an overview of the published studies and the main authors.     

Can gamification improve the virtual reality tourism experience? Analyzing the mediating role of tourism fatigue

Although virtual reality (VR) technology has been increasingly applied in the tourism industry, improving the VR experience of tourists remains a challenge. Based on two studies, this paper examines how gamification can improve the VR tourism experience through reducing tourism fatigue. Study 1 explores the relationship between gamification, tourism fatigue, and tourist satisfaction. The results show that tourists are more satisfied with a gamified, rather than non-gamified, VR tourism experience, and that motivational fatigue plays a mediating role between gamification and tourism satisfaction. Study 2 provides further evidence that four elements in gamification (challenge, feedback, reward, and leaderboard) can alleviate motivational fatigue and improve tourist satisfaction, with feedback playing the biggest role. The findings have valuable practical implications for VR experience providers, for destination practitioners in VR experience enhancement, and for the application of gamification to the VR tourism experience.     

Could virtual reality effectively market slow travel in a heritage destination?

A recent trend in tourism research involves the application of high technology in marketing practices such as virtual reality (VR), cell phone apps, and new media. Among these, VR is the most novel. In 2016, Discovery Travel created TRVLR, which includes all seven continents. Even earlier, specific tourist destinations were providing VR content about their respective locales. These venues expose potential tourists to tourist locations by immersing them in a visceral, 360-degree storytelling setting. However, while VR has gradually grown in popularity in the tourism industry, the marketing effects have been infrequently studied by academia. This research asked participants to view a VR presentation of a famous 700-year-old Chinese painting, and investigated viewers' nostalgia and ST travel intentions. Information was collected from 308 samples at certain popular tourist destinations around Fuzhou in the Fujian Province of China, and Taipei and Taoyuan in Taiwan. Structural equation modeling was then used to analyze the collected data and test the hypotheses. The findings indicate that VR is a very useful tool for encouraging respondents to travel to Jinan in a slower and more intensely observational manner, significantly arousing their sense of nostalgia and leading to a strong intention to ST to Jinan. This research provides important insights into how this new technology might function as a tool for marketing Jinan, a tier-two but historically important destination in China. The implications of these findings are important to understanding the associations for potential tourists among VR use, destination marketing, and travel intention, particularly when the object city is relatively unknown.