Tourism and mobile technology

Abstract. While tourism presents considerable potential for the use of new mobile technologies, we currently have little understanding of how tourists organise their activities or of the problems they face. This paper presents an ethnographic study of city tourists ’ practices that draws out a number of implications for designing tourist technology. We describe how tourists work together in groups, collaborate around maps and guidebooks, and both ‘pre- ’ and ‘post-visit ’ places. Implications are drawn for three types of tourist technology: systems that explicitly support how tourists co-ordinate, electronic guidebooks and maps, and electronic tour guide applications. We discuss applications of these findings, including the Travelblog, which supports building travel–based web pages while on holiday

Towards a Benefits Theory of Leisure Well-Being

We view leisure well-being as satisfaction in leisure life that contributes to subjective well-being. The model we propose focuses on how leisure activities contribute to leisure well-being. We surmise that a leisure activity contributes to leisure well-being by satisfying a set of basic needs (benefits related to safety, health, economic, sensory, escape, and/or sensation/stimulation needs) and growth needs (benefits related to symbolic, aesthetic, moral, mastery, relatedness, and/or distinctiveness needs). Also, further amplification occurs when certain benefits of leisure activities match corresponding personality traits and goals of the participants; safety consciousness, health consciousness, price sensitivity, hedonism, escapism, sensation seeking, status consciousness, aestheticism, moral sensitivity, competitiveness, sociability, and need for distinctiveness, respectively