Wolfram Höpken

Information search with mobile tourist guides: a survey of usage intention.

As mobile tourist guides show huge potentials to support tourists’ information search, executives need to know which mobile systems characterized by which specific functionalities should be provided. The paper proposes an empirical approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods to deduce both, product definition and product marketing information related to mobile tourist guides, respectively. First, a methodology-mix combining qualitative (i.e. explorative survey, focus group interviews) and quantitative techniques (i.e. pilot study, expert interviews) responds to the question ‘Which services should be developed?’ Secondly, again in the pre-prototype phase and based on survey data (N = 705) ideal functionality compositions for promising tourist guides are deduced with regression analysis. Finally, based on technology acceptance theory (Venkatesh et al., 2003a) customer prejudices towards mobile tourist guides are identified. The obtained results support hypotheses indicating strong performance expectations and pronounced effort expectancies towards the deduced concepts designed to support information search by means of mobile tourist guides

E-Business Readiness, Intensity, and Impact: An Austrian Destination Management Organization Study

The majority of today’s information and communication technology (ICT) impact studies disregard infrastructural, organizational, and environmental factors typically responsible for successful e-business adoption and use. This article proposes an empirical approach that shows how the mentioned factors determine both e-business adoption and the impact of information and communication technologies. The research framework is based on E. Rogers’ Innovation Diffusion Theory and is tested with survey data gathered in the Austrian destination management organization sector. By referring to K. Zhu and K. L. Kraemer’s (2005) e-business impact model, the proposed approach explicates how the use of e-business applications may positively affect the performance of tourism organizations. Online survey data are analyzed through a linear structural equation modeling approach.

Context-based adaptation of mobile applications in tourism

Mobile guides (based on PDAs, smart phones, or mobile phones) play an increasingly important role in tourism, giving tourists ubiquitous access to relevant information especially during their trip. Due to a more difficult access to mobile applications in a ubiquitous usage environment, based on time constraints, lighting conditions, bandwidth, etc., user acceptance of mobile applications strongly depends on the application adaptation to the concrete usage context. This article presents a framework for mobile applications in tourism, enabling a flexible implementation of adaptive, context-aware tourism applications. The framework especially provides approaches for user interface adaptation, content adaptation (recommendation), and interaction modality adaptation. The framework has been prototypically instantiated and evaluated in two different application scenarios, a city guide for the city of Innsbruck and a skiing guide for the ski resort DolomitiSuperski. Both application scenarios showed high usage rates and customer satisfaction and proved the applicability and effectiveness of the presented approach for developing adaptive mobile tourism applications.

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2009

The dynamic nature of tourism markets has become ever more pronounced and innovative business models like online communities continue to emerge. ENTER 2009 pays attention to this situation and the theme eTourism: dynamic challenges for travel and tourism expresses the objective to present a collection of cutting-edge academic and industrial research as well as practical applications dealing with new challenges and new ways of doing business in a rapidly changing and highly dynamic environment. 42 peer-reviewed papers cover a wide range of cutting edge topics currently driving research and development activities in the field of IT and travel and tourism such as online communities, user generated content, recommender systems, mobile technology, platforms and tools, website optimisation, electronic marketing, ICT and tourism destinations and technology acceptance.

Evaluating Recommender Systems in Tourism — A Case Study from Austria

Recommender systems (RS) are employed to personalize user interaction with (e.g. tourism) web-sites, supporting both navigation through large service assortments and the configuration of individual service packages. Depending on the interaction strategy, RS are either utilized to elicit users’ tastes and preferences or to stimulate desire for different offerings. In addition, as a potentially rich source of digital traces, RS also act as a repository for marketing intelligence. Web-usage mining is an accepted approach to analyse web-usage behaviour based on information traces left by the web-user (Mobasher, 2007). This paper proposes an empirically tested approach which combines typical web-log data with user feedback gathered by an interactive travel advisory system developed for an Austrian spa-resort. The proposed approach focuses on evaluating the RS with respect to efficiency, effectiveness and actionable marketing intelligence.

Application of QR Codes in Online Travel Distribution

Mobile services support various situations in everyday life and with the spread of mobile internet and better equipped mobile devices mobile services are becoming increasingly important, especially in tourism. Mobile tagging, based on QR codes or similar approaches, offers a technique to increase the accessibility of mobile services. In this paper potential applications of QR Codes in tourism, and specifically within a cultural institution (the Mercedes-Benz Museum), are identified and prototypically implemented. In a second step, these application scenarios are evaluated within a test user study. Results show that both, usability and intention to use the services are potentially high and QR codes are able to provide additional comfort in accessing mobile content and services.

Adaptive Recommender Systems for Travel Planning

Conversational recommender systems have been introduced in Travel and Tourism applications in order to support interactive dialogues which assist users in acquiring their goals, e.g., travel planning in a dynamic packaging system. Notwithstanding this increased interactivity, these systems employ an interaction strategy that is specified a priori (at design time) and is followed quite rigidly during the interaction. In this paper we illustrate a new type of conversational recommender system which uses Reinforcement Learning techniques in order to autonomously learn an adaptive interaction strategy. After a successful validation in an off-line experiment (with simulated users), the approach is now applied within an online recommender system which is supported by the Austrian Tourism portal (Austria.info). In this paper, we present the methodology behind the adaptive conversational recommender system and a summarization of the most important issues which have been addressed in order to validate the approach in an online context with real users.

etPlanner: An IT Framework for Comprehensive and Integrative Travel Guidance

Recommender systems in travel industry make helpful and persuasive product and service suggestions and thus reduce the burden of information overload and domain complexity for users. Within the scope of the etPlanner project we innovate existing technology by considering all trip phases and by supporting next to standard Web interfaces also different mobile devices.

Exploiting semantic web technologies for harmonizing e-markets.

MIRELLA DELL’ERBA,* OLIVER FODOR,† WOLFRAM HO¨PKEN,‡ and HANNES WERTHNER§*eCommerce and Tourism Research Laboratory-eCTRL, ITC-Irst, Trento, Italy†E-Commerce Competence Center-EC3, Vienna, Austria‡eTourism Competence Center Austria-ECCA, Innsbruck, Austria§Department of Information Systems and e-tourism, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Building a mobile tourist guide based on tourists' on-site information needs.

Mobile information services are gradually supplementing and may in the future even replace traditional information sources to support tourists during on-site stay. The scope of the article is to identify mobile information services, already in the preprototype phase, types and functionalities of which are most relevant to tourists during their urban destination stay. For this aim a user-centered approach using both focus groups and expert surveys is proposed. In addition, multiple regression based on acceptance data gathered from 705 tourists allows the deduction of potentially accepted mobile information services targeted to the specific destination use. Finally, by drawing on these results, the architectural framework as well as the various building and implementation steps of a mobile tourist guide called innsbruck.mobile are discussed.