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

Personalized Market Basket Prediction with Temporal Annotated Recurring Sequences

Nowadays, a hot challenge for supermarket chains is to offer personalized services to their customers. Market basket prediction, i.e., supplying the customer a shopping list for the next purchase according to her current needs, is one of these services. Current approaches are not capable of capturing at the same time the different factors influencing the customer's decision process: co-occurrence, sequentuality, periodicity and recurrency of the purchased items. To this aim, we define a pattern Temporal Annotated Recurring Sequence (TARS) able to capture simultaneously and adaptively all these factors. We define the method to extract TARS and develop a predictor for next basket named TBP (TARS Based Predictor) that, on top of TARS, is able to understand the level of the customer's stocks and recommend the set of most necessary items. By adopting the TBP the supermarket chains could crop tailored suggestions for each individual customer which in turn could effectively speed up their shopping sessions. A deep experimentation shows that TARS are able to explain the customer purchase behavior, and that TBP outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors

Utilizing integrated marketing communications to advance purchase intention of customers by improving digital marketing content and channels

Modern customers and their widespread use of digital media offer new opportunities for companies to gather revenues. Companies have therefore started to invest increasingly in digital growth and visibility (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Trainor (2012) stated that customers are no longer satisfied with only being passive targets of marketing actions, but want instead to serve as co-creators of value, engage with the company and connect with other customers having valuable insights (Trainor, 2012; Garretson, 2008). To succeed in customer empowered world companies need a holistic and customer-centric communication strategy such as integrated marketing communications (IMC) to attract potential customers with a relevant and consistent message across channels. According to Wymbs (2011), digital marketing is actually the most effective when integrated with traditional channels such as face-to-face, the phone or direct mail. The theoretical model in this thesis is based on a combination of the four pillars of integrated marketing communications by Kliathcko (2008) and the AIDAS-model, which can be used in planning customer-centric advertising activities as it refers to a generalized customer purchasing journey, including following stages: awareness, interest, desire, action and satisfaction (Rawal, 2013). The objective of this thesis is to provide understanding of how companies can trigger purchase intention of customers with integrated digital marketing by understanding the values and channel and content preferences of customers. The main focus is on channel and content pillars of IMC. According to the literature review, previous IMC and value research are mainly focused on retail or product context. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to bring insight into the service context. This research is provided for the needs of Fortum HorsePower and collecting the data was implemented by interviewing existing customers of Fortum HorsePower-service, which is the main limitation in this study. As the IMC aims at providing customer-centric communications, it was a rational choice to collect data by interviewing customers. Altogether, ten in-depth interviews were carried out to obtain understanding of the research phenomena. The findings suggested that channel choices and content may affect the purchase intention of customers. It seems that the information needs and preferred channels may vary depending on the stage of purchasing journey. The interviewees named content topics they find interesting and also values that guide their decision-making, and these topics and values should be utilized in content creation and customer value proposition to provide attractive and relevant advertising. Several interviewees stated that they look for user reviews on digital channels or call their acquaintances as pre-purchase investigation and actually more than half of the interviewees could make the purchase based on reviews. Websites, email and Facebook were the most preferred digital channels among the interviewees, but despite the digital context of the research, traditional phone calls and face-to-face meetings with sales representatives are wished for. The theoretical contribution of this research provides understanding of channel choices and content topics that may advance purchase intention towards action. Future research could deepen the understanding of IMC at different stages of the customer journey, which would help to customize advertising and to use attribution modeling to understand the effectiveness of different customer touch points

Information Outlook, September 2004

Volume 8, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2004/1008/thumbnail.jp

Information-seeking on the Web with Trusted Social Networks - from Theory to Systems

This research investigates how synergies between the Web and social networks can enhance the process of obtaining relevant and trustworthy information. A review of literature on personalised search, social search, recommender systems, social networks and trust propagation reveals limitations of existing technology in areas such as relevance, collaboration, task-adaptivity and trust. In response to these limitations I present a Web-based approach to information-seeking using social networks. This approach takes a source-centric perspective on the information-seeking process, aiming to identify trustworthy sources of relevant information from within the user's social network. An empirical study of source-selection decisions in information- and recommendation-seeking identified five factors that influence the choice of source, and its perceived trustworthiness. The priority given to each of these factors was found to vary according to the criticality and subjectivity of the task. A series of algorithms have been developed that operationalise three of these factors (expertise, experience, affinity) and generate from various data sources a number of trust metrics for use in social network-based information seeking. The most significant of these data sources is Revyu.com, a reviewing and rating Web site implemented as part of this research, that takes input from regular users and makes it available on the Semantic Web for easy re-use by the implemented algorithms. Output of the algorithms is used in Hoonoh.com, a Semantic Web-based system that has been developed to support users in identifying relevant and trustworthy information sources within their social networks. Evaluation of this system's ability to predict source selections showed more promising results for the experience factor than for expertise or affinity. This may be attributed to the greater demands these two factors place in terms of input data. Limitations of the work and opportunities for future research are discussed

Boston Hospitality Review: Fall 2017

Table of contents: Design: A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place: The Application of Feng Shui to Hotels by Ingrid Y. Lin -- Sharing Economy: The hotel industry’s Achilles Heel? Quantifying the negative impacts of Airbnb on Boston’s hotel performance by Makarand Mody, Courtney Suess-Raeisinafchi, and Tarik Dogru -- History: Fragments of the Past: The Exchange Buffet, Building a Business on Trust for 78 Years by Dr. Peter Szende and Jeanne Pak -- Theory: “The Six Touchstones” A Model for Hospitality Students by Christopher C. Muller and Michael Oshins -- Hotels: A (Diamond) Cut Above the Rest: Improving Hotel Operations Based on TripAdvisor Rating Attributes by Suzanne Markham BagneraTable of contents: Design: A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place: The Application of Feng Shui to Hotels by Ingrid Y. Lin -- Sharing Economy: The hotel industry’s Achilles Heel? Quantifying the negative impacts of Airbnb on Boston’s hotel performance by Makarand Mody, Courtney Suess-Raeisinafchi, and Tarik Dogru -- History: Fragments of the Past: The Exchange Buffet, Building a Business on Trust for 78 Years by Dr. Peter Szende and Jeanne Pak -- Theory: “The Six Touchstones” A Model for Hospitality Students by Christopher C. Muller and Michael Oshins -- Hotels: A (Diamond) Cut Above the Rest: Improving Hotel Operations Based on TripAdvisor Rating Attributes by Suzanne Markham Bagner