eTourism for socio-economic development

Tourism has often been described as an economic driving force that contributes to rural and emerging economies development. However, when it comes to the social aspect of development the nature of this contribution is still debated by academics. Information and Communication Technologies can help enhancing the socio-economic contribution of tourism by fostering community-based tourism independent marketing and sales dis-intermediation. eT4D can be defined as the independent use of technologies by micro and small community based tourism firms to market and sell their products and services thus fostering local socio-economic development

eTourism for Development (eT4D): The Missing Piece in the ICT4D Research Agenda

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Travel Agencies: From online channel conflict to multi-channel harmony

The adoption of Internet as a distribution channel and a privileged e-commerce tool has pressed Travel Agencies (TAs) to a latent channel conflict. Our main interest is to understand how the traditional independent travel agencies in Portugal deal with the online channel. We suggest that TAs have to develop an innovative business model based on the online and offline complementary channels, in order to achieve a multi-channel harmony

PEMANFAATAN TEKNOLOGI INFORMASI DAN KOMUNIKASI (TIK) PADA PENGEMBANGAN DESA WISATA NGLANGGERAN

Pariwisata perdesaan atau yang di Indonesia kerap disebut dengan istilah “desa wisata” merupakan salah satu model pengembangan pariwisata yang banyak diterapkan di negara berkembang, tidak terkecuali juga di Indonesia. Pengembangan desa wisata diketahui dapat digunakan sebagai alat pengembangan wilayah karena adanya manfaat ekonomi, sosial, maupun lingkungan yang dapat diberikannya. Salah satu desa wisata yang berkembang di Indonesia adalah Desa Wisata Nglanggeran di Kecamatan Patuk, Kabupaten Gunung Kidul, Provinsi DIY. Desa Wisata Nglanggeran memiliki daya tarik utama berupa Gunung Api Purba yang berdasarkan sejarah geologisnya telah berumur tersier atau telah ada sejak 0,6 – 70 juta tahun yang lalu. Pengembangan Desa Wisata Nglanggeran kini sudah berkembang secara pesat akibat terwujudnya peran serta masyarakat yang diwujudkan melalui prinsip pengelolaan berbasis masyarakat (CBT) dan juga terjalinnya kemitraan baik dengan pemerintah, NGO, BUMN, maupun swasta

The Almost Great Escape: The Continuing Tourism Development of Croatia as a Destination

The tourism industry in Croatia is experiencing a slower development than other European countries. Because of their current union in the communist state of Yugoslavia and the Civil War between Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Croatian Tourism Board needs to recreate a stable infrastructure in which to grow their tourism. Some of the occurring issues with current Croatian tourism is high seasonality, lack of multiple foreign languages, underdeveloped transportation structures, and homogenization of Croatian culture. This paper offers a brief history of Croatian tourism, current developments, current development issues, and suggestions for a change in managerial structure to increase the amount of tourists to the state and to overall improve the Croatian economy while focusing on interdisciplinary methods

Tourists behavior during their trip: How they use and offer recommendations?

The rise of new technologies has changed the way tourists trust in eWOM to choose a restaurant. There is a growing use of opinion and price comparison websites, where opinions and ratings can be shared with other users. In addition, the spreading of false or paid comments has made this type of webs seek the generation and maintenance of trust. However, there are few studies that analyse how to generate trust in these webs and its effect in the intention of the consumer to participate in WOM behaviours, once the tourist is already in its tourist destination. Therefore, this research analyses the influence of recommendations on the generation of tourists’ trust in the review websites of restaurant industry while they are in the destination. A regression analysis of data from 439 tourists has revealed that the perceived credibility, the quality of the information and the quality of the web affect trust in review websites. This fact encourages the contracting of restaurant services and communication among consumers, both in a traditional way (WOM) and through the review websites (eWOM), while the tourist is in the tourism destination.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Selling Rooms Online: The Use of Social Media and Online Travel Agents

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on the reason why hoteliers choose to be present in online travel agent (OTA) and social media web sites for sales purposes. It also investigates the technological and human factors related to these two practices. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a survey sent to a wide range of hotels in a Swiss touristic region. The empirical analysis involves the specification of two ordered logit models exploring the importance (in terms of online sales) of both social media and the online travel agent, Booking.com. Findings – Findings highlight the constant tension between visibility and online sales in the web arena, as well as a clear distinction in social media and OTA web site adoption between hospitality structures using online management tools and employing personnel with specific skills. Practical implications – The research highlights the need for the hospitality industry to maintain an effective presence on social media and OTAs in order to move towards the creation of a new form of social booking technologies to increase their visibility and sales. Originality/value – This research contributes to understanding the major role played by OTAs and social media in the hospitality industry while underlining the possibility of a major interplay between the two

Exploring the experiences of instructors teaching massive open online courses in tourism and hospitality: a mixed methods approach

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have existed as a disruptive educational phenomenon for nine years. Grounded in the roots of distance education, open education, Open Educational Resources, and OpenCourseWare, MOOCs have now survived various critics and have continued growing globally. Reports about MOOCs in both the press and scholarly publications began to grow significantly in 2013 (Sánchez-Vera, Leon Urrutia, & Davis, 2015; Zancanaro & Domingues, 2017) and, since then, more and more researchers have joined the discussions, developing them to explore various new topics. To contribute to the literature of MOOC studies, this doctoral thesis begins with an in-depth analysis of the background, history, growth, and vision, and proposes a tentative definition of MOOCs. Meanwhile, by conducting bibliometric research to review MOOC studies conducted between 2015 and 2017, this thesis fills in the gap that has existed due to a lack of systematic reviews of MOOC literature since 2015. The results of the bibliometric research summarised the relevant MOOC research into nine categories, including learner focused, commentary and concepts, case reports or evaluations, pedagogy, curriculum and design, course object focused, provider focused, technology, systematic review of literature, and learning analytics and big data. They also suggested a limited amount of provider focused research, which became the research interest and focus of this thesis. In the centre of the Europe, Swiss universities have marched forward in the MOOC movement, together with other over 550 universities (Shah, 2016) around the world. Università della Svizzera italiana (USI; Lugano, Switzerland), a Swiss public university, became a MOOC provider in 2015 and offered the first MOOC in the topic of eTourism: eTourism: Communication Perspectives. This doctoral thesis is closely related to this university-level initiative, which was dedicated to producing the first pilot MOOC at USI. Therefore, the cases chosen by this thesis are positioned in the discipline of tourism and hospitality. The first MOOC with a large audience taught artificial intelligence in 2011 (Zancanaro & Domingues, 2017). Nowadays, MOOCs have broken the barrier of space and time to educate the masses in a wide range of subjects. However, the provision of MOOCs in the subject of tourism and hospitality did not appear until 2013, when two MOOCs from two American universities became available. In the past four years since these MOOCs were launched, the number of tourism and hospitality MOOCs available in the market has remained limited (Tracey, Murphy, & Horton-Tognazzini, 2016). This scarcity contradicts the fact that tourism and hospitality is the field that contributes the most to the employment of the global workforce. Pressing problems, such as high turnover, seasonality, and new global challenges have urged for solutions to quickly training people working in this area to become available (Cantoni, Kalbaska, & Inversini, 2009). A call for more studies about tourism and hospitality MOOCs has emerged. The combined reality of the lack of studies regarding MOOC providers, opportunities for first-hand experience of producing a tourism MOOC in a university, and the deficiency in both the research and practises of tourism and hospitality MOOCs has inspired the direction of this thesis in regard to exploring MOOC instructors’ experiences, using cases in the field of tourism and hospitality. It cumulates six studies, using a mixed methods approach, to tackle the two main research objectives: to investigate at large the tourism and hospitality MOOC provisions between 2008 and 2015 and to report the experiences of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) when producing the eTourism MOOC. In order, the first two studies in Chapter 3 of this thesis focus on tourism and hospitality MOOCs in general and produce a big picture context for the other four studies in Chapter 4. The first study proposes a conceptual framework through which to describe and analyse the course design of a MOOC and applies it to 18 tourism and hospitality MOOCs produced between 2008 and 2015. The second study then continues to interview six tourism and hospitality MOOC instructors, to describe their experiences and perspectives of teaching MOOCs. After exploring a holistic view of the overall development of MOOCs in tourism and hospitality and gaining a deep understanding of the instructors behind these offerings, this thesis introduces the experiences of one single MOOC provider: Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Chapter 4. It first introduces its overall implementation process (Study 3), and further elaborates three phases of this process: how it selected a suitable MOOC platform at the beginning (Study 4); how it assessed learner engagement in the MOOC (Study 5); and, eventually, how it evaluated the performance of the MOOC (Study 6). This thesis was written mainly from the perspective of eLearning, with the intention of benefiting its community of scholars and practitioners. It has contributed to the literature by developing a framework with which to review MOOCs (in Study 1), the implementation process of producing MOOCs (in Study 2), practical review schema of MOOC platforms (in Study 4), the MOOC Learner Engagement Online Survey (in Study 5), and how to use the Kirkpatrick model to evaluate MOOCs (in Study 6). These conceptual frameworks and experiential tools can benefit future researchers and practitioners. Meanwhile, due to its intimate connection with the field of tourism and hospitality, by directly using its cases, the research outputs of the six studies can also benefit the tourism and hospitality education and training sector as a reference for further action

Towards a conceptualisation of smart tourists and their role within the smart destination scenario

‘Smart tourism’ and ‘smart destinations’ have been gaining attention as new frameworks within which to understand the impact the latest information and communication technologies (ICTs) have on the relationship between businesses, destinations and tourists. However, there is a crucial element of the smart tourism ecosystem that has been rather neglected in research hitherto: the tourists themselves. By acknowledging a shift in tourists’ behaviour due to the advent of disruptive factors, this paper conceptualises the recently emerged notion of ‘the smart tourist’. This new type of tourist is profiled through a description of their attitudes and behaviours, and their role within the smart destination scenario is depicted. By taking a consumer-centric perspective and framing the conceptualisation within the relevant theories, this paper contributes to the current body of knowledge on tourism in a highly technological context and facilitates bridging smart tourism theoretical foundations with empirical research. The observed transformation in tourists’ behaviour and its encapsulation in the smart tourist conceptualisation reveal critical managerial implications for both destination management organisations and businesses in the rapidly changing smart tourism ecosystem.Research carried out within the project ‘Analysis of planning processes applied to smart cities and smart tourism destinations. Balance and methodological proposal for tourist spaces: Smart Tourism Planning’ (CSO2017-82592-R) under the Spanish National R&D&I Plan and Grant no. BES-2015-073909, funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness