Emotions, behaviour and belief regulation in an intelligent guide with attitude

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Experiencing Finnish Lapland: Design for Sustainability Through Cultural Communication in Tourism

Tourism, as an important domestic economy booster, has been heavily hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and severely declined. Governments are rethinking tourism for future new opportunities. Previous research has shown that large development scale of tourism is not conducive to sustainability, nevertheless, researchers have also found that managing tourists’ behavior can reduce the adverse effects, while other studies are proposing the effectiveness of environmental education on sustainability. However, little attention has been paid to the combination of environmental education and tourist management for sustainability purpose. This study aims to explore the potential of sustainability-oriented design through cultural communication in tourism. No matter what method is used to communicate sustainability, this research believes that the impacts of communication should seek to be sustainable and far-reaching, and more importantly to be applied in reality to present its value. To achieve the goal, this study takes Finnish Lapland as a practical entry point, follows service design thinking and takes ethnography as the research strategy, conducting qualitative research through semi-structured interviews, field studies, and workshops. The data from 57 stakeholders have been collected to quest opportunities and needs, based on which, a design outcome was produced as feedback for iterate. The findings show that sensory design can prolong the impact of sustainability, and the application of environmental education as a cultural content can meet the needs of stakeholders while contributing to sustainability. Furthermore, online sales may provide alternative options to alleviate COVID-19 impact on tourism industry and to build economic resilience and consumer confidence. The results show considerable potential in cultural communication for sustainability in tourism, which offers directions for future research in the area

Accessible Tourism in Russia: Recommendations for a Universal Design, Barrier-free Environment

Recently, barrier-free tourism has become increasingly important. The number of people with disabilities around the world is growing. Most of these people want and can travel. But not all countries and cities have a sufficiently adapted environment for comfortable movement. The purposes of this master’s thesis are to research accessible tourism in the cities of the Russian Federation, determine the problems that people with disabilities face in Russia during travel, understand how the lack of an available environment affects the desire to travel. The principles of universal design are also discussed in this work, and special attention is paid to how these principles should be followed in the tourism industry. In addition, define what changes will be the most effective in developing an accessible environment and will be able to lead to an increase in the number of disabled people as participants in tourism. This study is based on semi-structured interviews. The questions for the research have been prepared after an extensive analysis of the current state of the theory. The research was performed among people with disabilities who use wheelchairs or their caregivers. The experiences of twelve participants were evaluated. The analyses of the interviews identified several challenges that the participants were dealing with. These findings provided a clearer understanding of the problems currently being experienced by the study group. They also helped address a number of outstanding research questions. To sum up the findings of this research, the availability of an accessible environment is a crucial factor when choosing a holiday destination for people with disabilities and their caregivers. The developed accessible environment gives people with disabilities a sense of freedom, independence, and makes them equal members of society and motivates them to choose new places to travel. Thus, creating a barrier-free environment might play an important role in attracting new visitors and become a serious competitive advantage among tourism companies

Strategic plan for the travel mobile app: The NoQ

This Master thesis pretends to develop a detailed strategic plan for the innovative idea of the NoQ mobile travel application. The main purpose of this plan is to examine the feasibility and viability of the project. In order to achieve this, several fundamental steps have been taken. First, the key concepts for this thesis, such as tourism, visitor attractions and smart tourism, were identified and explained for their better understanding and unification. After that, a micro and macro analysis of the market in which the project will be implemented was conducted. To deepen the investigation, an internal evaluation of the company was carried out and the level of its competitiveness was examined. The knowledge and data obtained in the first part of the thesis were used in the following functional part. This section defines the future objectives of the strategic plan, as well as, the development strategy that includes the mission, vision, values and critical success factor of the NoQ. The final chapter contains the project implementation plan, including marketing activities shown by means of the Marketing Mix, along with the company organizational structure and schedule of operations for setting up the business. Furthermore, this section specifies the NoQ’s key resources, which have been broken down into human, physical, intellectual and financial resources. Finally, the implementation requirements for establishing a company and additional legal requirements have been defined.A presente dissertação de mestrado pretende desenvolver um plano estratégico detalhado para a aplicação móvel de viagens NoQ. O principal objetivo deste plano é estudar a viabilidade deste projeto. Para isso, várias etapas fundamentais foram tomadas. Primeiramente, os conceitos-chave para elaborar esta tese, como o turismo, as atrações turísticas e o turismo inteligente, foram identificados e explicados em detalhe para uma melhor compreensão. Seguidamente, foram realizadas uma micro e macro análise do mercado em que o projeto estará integrado. Para aprofundar a análise, foi realizada uma avaliação interna da empresa e foi também analisado o seu nível de competitividade. Os conhecimentos e dados obtidos na primeira parte da tese foram utilizados na parte subsequente da tese. Esta secção define os objetivos futuros do plano estratégico, bem como a estratégia de desenvolvimento que inclui a missão, visão, valores e fator crítico de sucesso do NoQ. O capítulo final contém o plano de implementação do projeto, incluindo as ações de marketing apresentadas por meio do Marketing Mix, juntamente com a estrutura organizacional da empresa e o cronograma de operações para a implantação do negócio. Além disso, esta seção especifica os recursos-chave do NoQ, que foram divididos em recursos humanos, físicos, intelectuais e financeiros. Por último, foram definidos os requisitos de implementação para o estabelecimento de uma empresa e os requisitos legais adicionais

Human-artificial intelligence engagement exploring the perspectives of users and tourism managers

The progress and sophistication of technological systems promise to accelerate the tourism sector, influencing business management at the commercial, human resources, and planning levels. The main objective of this thesis is to analyse the evolution of the literature on artificial intelligence and how it can be integrated with the constructs of engagement, intimate knowledge, authenticity, attachment, and psychological ownership. Several analyses were carried out to achieve the intended results. First, a comprehensive literature review was done, through the analysis of scientific articles, to understand the development of scientific research on artificial intelligence and user engagement. Secondly, a qualitative study was conducted to evaluate the impact of virtual assistants in the tourism industry, both at the organization and customer levels, using the thematic analysis method in structured interviews with top managers of the tourism sector. The results show that the benefits of using artificial intelligence outweigh the negative ones and will impact firm management. Finally, two quantitative studies were performed to analyse which factors influence customer engagement. The first study analyses the constructs of authenticity and attachment as motivators of engagement between tourists and virtual assistants, proving that these factors significantly influence the interaction between both. The second study investigates the communication between the virtual assistant and the user, emphasizing the importance of intimate knowledge, authenticity, and connection as psychological motivators. The results show that all three constructs significantly impact customer engagement with the virtual assistant

A context aware recommender system for tourism with ambient intelligence

Recommender system (RS) holds a significant place in the area of the tourism sector. The major factor of trip planning is selecting relevant Points of Interest (PoI) from tourism domain. The RS system supposed to collect information from user behaviors, personality, preferences and other contextual information. This work is mainly focused on user’s personality, preferences and analyzing user psychological traits. The work is intended to improve the user profile modeling, exposing relationship between user personality and PoI categories and find the solution in constraint satisfaction programming (CSP). It is proposed the architecture according to ambient intelligence perspective to allow the best possible tourist place to the end-user. The key development of this RS is representing the model in CSP and optimizing the problem. We implemented our system in Minizinc solver with domain restrictions represented by user preferences. The CSP allowed user preferences to guide the system toward finding the optimal solutions; RESUMO O sistema de recomendação (RS) detém um lugar significativo na área do sector do turismo. O principal fator do planeamento de viagens é selecionar pontos de interesse relevantes (PoI) do domínio do turismo. O sistema de recomendação (SR) deve recolher informações de comportamentos, personalidade, preferências e outras informações contextuais do utilizador. Este trabalho centra-se principalmente na personalidade, preferências do utilizador e na análise de traços fisiológicos do utilizador. O trabalho tem como objetivo melhorar a modelação do perfil do utilizador, expondo a relação entre a personalidade deste e as categorias dos POI, assim como encontrar uma solução com programação por restrições (CSP). Propõe-se a arquitetura de acordo com a perspetiva do ambiente inteligente para conseguir o melhor lugar turístico possível para o utilizador final. A principal contribuição deste SR é representar o modelo como CSP e tratá-lo como problema de otimização. Implementámos o nosso sistema com o solucionador em Minizinc com restrições de domínio representadas pelas preferências dos utilizadores. O CSP permitiu que as preferências dos utilizadores guiassem o sistema para encontrar as soluções ideais