Tourism interpretation: an overview of its influence and research trend

Tourist's understanding and interest towards destination, especially urban tourism cities, is highly subjected to its interpretation that concern about tourist information acquisition. Tourism interpretation reveals significance of destination, instils emotional value, and consequently creates meanings to tourist. Existing literatures indicates that interpretation would significantly deepened tourist's destination insight, and improves travel experience. From the psychological perspective, personal connection with destination can be established when there is a good match between tourist expectation and interpretation provided. As tourist experience is highly psychological and cognitive in nature, quality interpretation is crucial in manipulating experience development. Specifically in urban destination, complexity of urban environment complicates tourist spatial cognition process. With technological engagement, it does give positive influence to the quality of interpretation, which may psychologically manipulate the way tourist perceives the destination. Witnessing the evolution in interpretation system, there is a need to relook on the impact of interpretation and understand its current research trend to apprehend the future direction of interpretation system development. Thus this review paper is intended to firstly unveil the importance of effective interpretation system in enhancing tourist travel experience and secondly to review the research trend in tourism interpretation within the research literature in the recent ten years

“Forent – Vehicle forensics for car rental system”

Car rental agencies primarily serve people who require temporary vehicles. However, many car rental damage scam cases involving car renter fail to present any evidence and being unfairly charged, for the damage that did not happen during rental. Concerning the current car rental systems that only allow customers to inspect the physical condition of the car, the objective of this project is to develop a mobile application for car rental system, FoRent, that implements the car diagnostic features. Through this system, the car owner and car renter will be able to record the physical condition and retrieve forensic data of the car using ELM327 device, before signing the rental agreement. In order to reduce security risk, this project introduces a security protocol to provide the integrity and availability of the data in FoRent. Enhancing the existing paper-and-pen car rental system, FoRent is remarkable as it introduces these special features that meet the requirement of the car rental company and customers

Tourists Experience on Islamic Architecture and its Influence on Destination Loyalty

Purpose: This paper investigates tourists' experience from the encounter with Islamic architecture and how it influences the formation of loyalty towards the visited destination, focusing on Islamic architecture in Putrajaya. Methods/Design/approach: This study employed a convenient sampling approach targeting domestic tourists in Malaysia. Self-administered online questionnaires were distributed through social media platforms, including Whatsapp, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The distribution of questionnaires on Facebook was done through social groups, such as 'Kaki Cuti', 'Bercuti di Negara sendiri', 'Jom Melancong'. A total of 265 samples were collected and data were analysed through descriptive analysis and statistical tests. Findings: The findings shows that aesthetic experience, emotional experience, and engaging experience are significant predictors of destination loyalty, with aesthetic experience as the strongest predictor. This means tourists experienced strong visual aesthetic stimulation in engaging with Islamic architecture, which resulted in significant influence on destination loyalty. Tourists also experience a significant level of emotional stimulation due to the special connection of religious bonds. Implication/Limitations: This study focused only on the perspective of domestic tourists due to the current scenario of COVID-19 pandemic. Future research is to look into the perspective of international tourists on Islamic architecture in Malaysia

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

Muslim-Friendly Hotel in Malaysia: Examining Muslim Tourists' Satisfaction

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to identify the level of tourist’s satisfaction in a Muslim friendly hotel. Methods/Design/approach: A total of 168 respondents of tourists who had experienced a stay in Muslim friendly hotel participated in this research. The data were analyzed by using IBM Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 26 through descriptive analysis. Findings: The findings of the study revealed that the majority of tourist satisfaction with all the attributes of Muslim friendly hotel. Above all the prayer room that clean and comfortable have a high value of mean for this variable. Implication: For the Muslim friendly hotel, they can know a specific attribute that led to the satisfaction of tourist. Hence, the hotel provider especially can improve their product to a better quality in order to boost the number of customers in their hotel. On Purpose: The aim of this paper is to identify the level of tourist’s satisfaction in a Muslim friendly hotel. Methods/Design/approach: A total of 168 respondents of tourists who had experienced a stay in Muslim friendly hotel participated in this research. The data were analyzed by using IBM Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 26 through descriptive analysis. Findings: The findings of the study revealed that the majority of tourist satisfaction with all the attributes of Muslim friendly hotel. Above all the prayer room that clean and comfortable have a high value of mean for this variable. Implication: For the Muslim friendly hotel, they can know a specific attribute that led to the satisfaction of tourist. Hence, the hotel provider especially can improve their product to a better quality in order to boost the number of customers in their hotel. On the other hand, they can add some elements that can make the hotel become more attractive and interesting that can attract the customers to come and stay

Virtual connectivity in mediating millennials destination emotional experience

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

The effects of mobile engagement on psychological experience among millennial tourists in an urban destination

Mobile utilisation has dictated tourists travel consumption and has psychologically altered the way tourists experience a destination. The Millennials, especially are addicted to mobile use and are perceived to contribute to poor tourist– destination encounters. Yet, this human-technology relation has managed to alter the pattern of tourists’ consumption to shape a new experiential dimension based on the technology-emotion relationship. Previous studies have acknowledged the influence of travel-related mobile engagement on the tourism experience. However, the extent of its enhancement on psychological perspective of tourists experience is still unclear. In particular, experience fulfilment is believed to lead to destination attachment and loyalty. Hence, it is critical to gain more insights into the elements that stimulate tourists’ psychological experiences. Therefore, this study aims to measure tourists’ psychological experience from mobile engagement and its impacts on destination attachment and loyalty. Kuala Lumpur City Centre was selected as the study area, as it offers extensive urban experiences. Millennial tourists were specified as the unit of analysis, as they are at the cutting-edge of digitalisation. Purposive sampling was used to select 387 respondents, and metadata tagging ‘#kualalumpur’ and ‘location checkin’ on social media platforms were established to filter the respondents. The findings revealed that Millennial appreciate the benefits of mobile engagement in facilitating and enhancing their travel experiences. Their mobile engagement mostly focused on knowledge-related activities instead of experiential-related activities. Yet, experiential-based mobile engagement was found to have the most significant influence on psychological experience. The psychological experience resulting from mobile engagement also significantly influenced the development of place attachment and destination loyalty. In sum, the mobile engagement experience is a strong antecedent to overall travel satisfaction. The results highlight the need for the city to enhance the competitiveness of its experiential offerings. Acknowledging the link between tourists’ psychological experience and mobile engagement is critical to assist destination management organisations to understand the demand of the current tourists’ market, besides helping to manage destination information infrastructure

Tourists responses to the use of mobile augmented reality for travel

Tourist experiences are shaped by the complexities of the individual visitor’s psychological factors, and it is widely known that tourists anticipate a positive experience from every trip made. Yet, the fact remains that travel is inextricably linked to the issues of geography and awareness and a misinterpretation of the attributes of a destination may lead to unlikely expectations that affect the entire experience. With the dynamic and interactive visualisation features offered by augmented reality (AR) on mobile phones and other smart handheld devices, this technology is viewed as being capable of closing the gap between tourist expectations and reality, thereby improving how tourists engage with their surroundings. Despite the known potential of this relatively new technology, its actual acceptance among the users is still minimal, especially in the Malaysian context. Considering this limitation, this study examined the extent of AR utilisation and its ability to influence the development of a tourists’ travel experience. The ‘Iskandar.my’ mobile AR app was used in this research to evaluate the tourists’ expectations, perception and satisfaction with the utilisation of this software platform to add value to their travel experience. The findings indicated that there was a statistically significant differences in the respondents’ experiences before and after using the AR content on the mobile app. The thrill associated with the use of this advanced technology was the primary factor in their satisfaction with the AR function. However, the lack of variety in the attractions covered, as well as the app’s currently limited offerings, were noted as factors that could affect the ‘Iskandar.my’ apps competitiveness with regard to other travel-related apps. Therefore, this researcher recommends that the developer of the app improve the design and service dimensions of the app to meet users’ travel needs