Millennial tourist emotional experience in technological engagement at destination

Millennial is known to be the generations that strongly empowered by technologies that apparently had altered the pattern of their consumption habits to shape a new form of tourist market. The great incursion of technology on Millennial does not only mediates the experience formation at destination, instead provide added value and emotional impact through its cognitive stimulation and experience co-creation possibilities. As the key instrument for experience enhancement, mobile technologies support users' needs of on-site information, virtually connect tourism providers and consumers, and unfold destination uniqueness. These in turn allow co-creation of tourist experience through satisfaction of Millennial's addiction of connectivity. Virtual connectivity seems to create new form of affective attachment, through which Millennial are emotionally bonded to the place due to the intensity of technological engagement. Consequently, instead of tourist-destination encounter per se, technological experience is potentially classified as the third aspects that dictate experience development, especially among Millennial travellers. Existing literatures indicates that Millennial strong engagement with virtual platform is capable to manipulate their on-site emotional experience, which apparently changing the conventional way of tourist experiencing the destination. Nevertheless, the significant of Millennial's technological engagement towards their destination emotional experience is still open for debates. Pertaining to this situation, this conceptual paper is attempted to understand the influence of technology in the enhancement of emotional experience, specifically among Millennial travellers, in better understanding the evolving demand of the new generations tourist from psychological perspective

Assessment of Impact of Global Business Environment on International Tourism Brands

In the article the concept of modern International tourism is considered. The certain estimation of influence of global factors of business-environment on the process of forming of International tourist brand of countries is presented. A role and place of sign measures is described in the sphere of tourism of International level in forming of International tourist brand of country. The distribution of the most influential factors in the groups of levels of perception of International tourist brand is conducted. The aim of research is theoretical principles and methodical approaches of forming of International tourist brand in the system of International tourism. Methodological basis of research is approach of the systems to the analysis of economic processes and phenomena in an International environment. The purpose of the work consists in a scientific grounding of teoretical and methodological principles of forming and keeping of International tourist brand of countries in the system of International tourism. Globalization, social and cultural identity at the level of separate tourist brand of a country and at the world level must dialectically co-operate and provide to tourists both the market of countries and objects interesting for a visit and market of tourist services of the world level, usually at the level of quality for any civilized tourist. However the factor of maintainance of originality as the main condition of authentication of International tourist brand of concrete country, maintainance of tourist attractiveness of this country must prevail, that conditions the essence of tourism as the method of cognition of different and usual culture, method of receipt of the new impressions. Only thus forming of International tourist brand of country becomes the mean of stimulation of demand on tourist services in a country

Enhancing travel experience with the combination of information visualization, situation awareness, and distributed cognition

With the new forms of travel introduced by new technologies of transportation and communication, a satisfied travel experience could be affected by various factors before and during a trip. Especially for road trips, traveling by car provides freedom on time control while leading to more possibilities of rescheduling initial plans made under time constraints. When overwhelmed with the need for changed travel context to avoid unexpected events that will require a serious change of initial plans, travelers need to find and access helpful contextual information quickly. This is a context-related decision making process that requires amplifying human situation awareness and supporting distributed cognition, since travel information offers multiple choices. To solve this problem, I applied information visualization as the main design solution. When comparing it with a traditional representation of lists, information visualization displays the advantages of visual representation of abstract data to clarify and depict the information and amplify cognition while improving travel experience intuitively in the domain of user experience design. Therefore in this thesis I will address the approach of implementing recontextualized situation awareness, distributed cognition, and information visualization in a travel-aid system. By using both theoretical and practical design perspectives, I will discuss how to enhance travel experience with represented contextual information that users desire or expect before and during a road trip. I will also explore the new values of this design with strategic business support. Additionally, after conducting research and analysis on existing interaction design parts, I selected a smartphone app to serve as a proper platform with connected multifunctions. Briefly, I begin the thesis with a review of previous theories and aspects of travel planning, information visualization as it relates to travel, situation awareness, and distributed cognition in the design context and related smartphone apps. Then I discuss the process of identifying the specific issues to be solved or improved with a preliminary research of empirical study, followed by an interview, online survey, insights synthesis, and business model design. After a visual-system design was developed, heuristic evaluation was employed to assess the outcome. Lastly, a new round of refined design results is introduced based on outcomes of the evaluation

Conservation GIS: Ontology and spatial reasoning for commonsense knowledge.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.Geographic information available from multiple sources are moving beyond their local context and widening the semantic difference. The major challenge emerged with ubiquity of geographic information, evolving geospatial technology and location-aware service is to deal with the semantic interoperability. Although the use of ontology aims at capturing shared conceptualization of geospatial information, human perception of world view is not adequately addressed in geospatial ontology. This study proposes ‘Conservation GIS Ontology’ that comprises spatial knowledge of non-expert conservationists in the context of Chitwan National Park, Nepal. The discussion is presented in four parts: exploration of commonsense spatial knowledge about conservation; development of conceptual ontology to conceptualize domain knowledge; formal representation of conceptualization in Web Ontology Language (OWL); and quality assessment of the ontology development tasks. Elicitation of commonsense spatial knowledge is performed with the notion of cognitive view of semantic. Emphasis is given to investigate the observation of wildlife movement and habitat change scenarios. Conceptualization is carried out by providing the foundation of the top-level ontology- ‘DOLCE’ and geospatial ontologies. Protégé 4.1 ontology editor is employed for ontology engineering tasks. Quality assessment is accomplished based on the intrinsic approach of ontology evaluation.(...

Geographic interpretation: The role of spatial knowledge in the interpretation of natural resources

A surge of interest in geographic information has stemmed from the recent proliferation of Geographic Information Systems, Global Positioning Systems, and web-based tools such as Google Earth. This growing interest in geographic information has many implications for natural resource interpretation. Visitor centers and interpretive centers have long been sources of geographic information---providing maps and exhibits depicting a site or region. Such displays come in all shapes and sizes and in a variety of media, including maps, models, projections, animations and dioramas. Yet missing from the field of interpretation is research on the effectiveness of these tools in conveying geographic information to visitors.;A need for research on visitors\u27 understanding of geographic and spatial concepts has also surfaced in the social science literature on wildland fire. Researchers have repeatedly intimated a lack of knowledge by the public regarding the size of fires. Interpretation is used as a tool to increase knowledge about fire effects and to influence attitudes towards fire policy. Using interpretation to communicate spatial concepts pertaining to fire is therefore a logical extension. The recent shift to ecosystem management has created a need to communicate to the public about the nature of landscape-level processes. This raises the question of how people perceive large landscapes and how they learn about large-scale spaces.;In the study reported in this thesis, the spatial cognition of National Forest visitors was researched through the use of a survey. Visitors to the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area and Mt. Hood National Forest in Oregon were sampled from March-April, 2006. These visitors were asked about their cognitive representations of forest environments and their perceptions of the size of a recent fire. Three methods were adapted from research on human cognition: schema representations, cognitive mapping, and language structure. The results revealed a significant difference between male and female perceptions of fire size and a general lack of knowledge concerning fire size for both groups.;This thesis also reviews the literature on spatial cognition and provides a theoretical and empirical basis to suggest strategies for interpretation. Principles of geographic interpretation are outlined, and the terms geointerpretation and sense of space are suggested and defined