Mobile Services for the Hospitality Industry

Mobile services appear to be an obvious choice for travel and tourism as the travellers are on the move, which is the first criterion for mobile services to be relevant. The travel and tourism industry, which is one of the largest and most rapidly expanding industries in the world and one of the significant users of ICT in its operations, will no doubt be an important market place for mobile services. Nevertheless, according to a study we conducted in 2003, only a few of the respondents were using mobile services to support their travel but many expressed their intention to use these services when they become viable for them. The travel and tourism industry has seen many dramatic changes within the last decade because of the possibilities offered through the wired internet. When mobile services start to offer an effective alternative to presently used routines and services it is expected that they will have a profound impact on the business models of the travel and tourism industry. The available mobile services in the hospitality industry are not as many and as value-adding as expected and we contrast them with the travellers’ attitudes and expectations in an empirical study. The results and insights collected while studying travellers were later used to build a mobile booking system prototype for a major hospitality chain in Finland

Why Hotel Guests Go Mobile

Many hotels are catering for mobile-centric travelers by offering technologies such as mobile apps, virtual reality, social media, and online communities. Dr. Tingting Zhang, Assistant Professor at UCF Rosen College of Hospitality Management, and her collaborators break new ground with their investigation into the attitudes and behavioral intentions of business travelers versus leisure travelers, when adopting mobile technologies for hotel services. The researchers have extended the technology acceptance model (TAM) to provide a framework for understanding consumers’ adoption behaviors of mobile technology for the hospitality industry

Smart technologies for personalized experiences: a case study in the hospitality domain

Recent advances in the field of technology have led to the emergence of innovative technological smart solutions providing unprecedented opportunities for application in the tourism and hospitality industry.With intensified competition in the tourism market place, it has become paramount for businesses to explore the potential of technologies, not only to optimize existing processes but facilitate the creation of more meaningful and personalized services and experiences. This study aims to bridge the current knowledge gap between smart technologies and experience personalization to understand how smart mobile technologies can facilitate personalized experiences in the context of the hospitality industry. By adopting a qualitative case study approach, this paper makes a two-fold contribution; it a) identifies the requirements of smart technologies for experience creation, including information aggregation, ubiquitous mobile connectedness and real time synchronization and b) highlights how smart technology integration can lead to two distinct levels of personalized tourism experiences. The paper concludes with the development of a model depicting the dynamic process of experience personalization and a discussion of the strategic implications for tourism and hospitality management and research

Understanding hotel visitors’ motives to use hotel gamified applications

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 in the area of the hospitality industry by identifying the motives of individuals’ when they use a hotel-gamified application. Hospitality industry is becoming more and more competitive and surviving and marketing a destination has become a challenge, so in order to gain a competitive advantage, the use of modern technology is crucial for many destination-marketing organizations. Gamification can be applied in technology-mediated and non-technology-mediated contexts. Within technology-mediated contexts, gamification is more applicable due to the favourable environment that such context offers. Recent evolutions indicate that mobile devices are becoming travel buddies and their use is profoundly influencing the different phases of a travellers’ journey. Hence, it could be assumed, that a mobile hotel gamified application is now easier than ever to develop and succeed. 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. Therefore, this study aims to understand the meaning of fun for individuals when they will use a hotel-gamified application, using visual material so the interviewees would have an idea of how a hotel-gamified application would look if it was in existence today based on the current definitions of gamification

Factors Influencing Hotel Managers’ Perceptions Regarding the Use of Mobile Apps to Gain a Competitive Advantage

The purpose of this quantitative study is to examine the opinions of hotel managers regarding the use of mobile applications in the hotel industry and to analyse the influence of these applications on a hotel’s perceived competitive advantage. Factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were performed to analyse the data collected from 106 hotel managers in Turkey. The results of the study indicate that the factors connection and assistance had a significant impact on hotel managers’ perceived competitive advantage. The findings of this study, one of the few that have examined managers’ attitudes toward the use of mobile apps in the hotel industry, provide valuable information that will help to guide technology vendors and software companies that develop mobile apps for hotel

Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet—The state of eTourism research

This paper reviews the published articles on eTourism in the past 20 years. Using a wide variety of sources, mainly in the tourism literature, this paper comprehensively reviews and analyzes prior studies in the context of Internet applications to Tourism. The paper also projects future developments in eTourism and demonstrates critical changes that will influence the tourism industry structure. A major contribution of this paper is its overview of the research and development efforts that have been endeavoured in the field, and the challenges that tourism researchers are, and will be, facing

Information Technology Applications in Hospitality and Tourism: A Review of Publications from 2005 to 2007

The tourism and hospitality industries have widely adopted information technology (IT) to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and most importantly to improve service quality and customer experience. This article offers a comprehensive review of articles that were published in 57 tourism and hospitality research journals from 2005 to 2007. Grouping the findings into the categories of consumers, technologies, and suppliers, the article sheds light on the evolution of IT applications in the tourism and hospitality industries. The article demonstrates that IT is increasingly becoming critical for the competitive operations of the tourism and hospitality organizations as well as for managing the distribution and marketing of organizations on a global scale

ICT diffusion and the digital divide in tourism: Kazakhstan perspective

No abstract available

The Issue of Tourist Accommodation in the Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism

The aim of the study is to analyze the contents of the articles published in the Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism with special attention paid to texts describing tourist accommodation in its broadest sense. The list of references was collected in a survey of Taylor & Francis Online1 which includes online editions of the journal