Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Life, by offering an immersive computer-generated tourism environment, have particularly
fostered interaction and co-creation experiences through avatars online (Guttentag 2010;
Kohler
et al
. 2011).
On
-
Site Travel Stage: Experiencing the tourism destination.
The on-site travel phase is the most
intensive phase with the highest potential for the co-creation of experience and value (Neuhofer
et al
. 2012). In this phase, different technologies can enhance the experience while moving
through the physical space. Mobile technologies play a key role (Egger and Jooss 2010), by
allowing for information retrieval anywhere and at any time (Wang
et al
. 2012). Emerging
mobile services, such as location based and context based services, gamifi cation or augmented
reality apps (Buhalis and Wagner 2013) all contribute to enhance the tourist's place experience
on-site (Tussyadiah and Zach 2011). It allows them to access information, media, booking sites
and recommendations, which are relevant to the tourist's current geographical location and
context, including season, weather, time of the day, situation and preferences. Furthermore, the
use of augmented reality applications enables tourists to overlay reality with virtual spatial
information and points of interests to enhance the tourist's entire travel experience in the
physical world (Yovcheva
et al
. 2013).
The role of ICTs during the holiday is thus to support tourists in the physical environment
and stay connected in the online space at the same time. By being interconnected to social
networking sites, such as Facebook or Twitter, tourists can share, comment and co-create with
friends, peers, tourism providers, and other consumers while being immersed in the tourism
destination (Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier 2009). This means that tourists no longer only co-create
with their physical surrounding, e.g. destination, hotels, attractions or other tourists but are now
empowered to co-create with their entire network in a virtual co-creation space (Neuhofer
et al
.
2012). Thus, tourism providers need to make use of technologies in order to fully exploit
co-creation with the tourist both in the physical and virtual space.
Post
-
Travel Stage: Remembering, sharing, recollecting.
Besides their integration in the pre- and
during travel stage, ICTs play an important role after the tourist's return to the home environment.
In the post-travel stage ICTs principally serve to engage, recollect, remember and share
experiences with destinations, users worldwide and their social network alike (Fotis
et al
. 2011).
For instance, tourists can post pictures on Facebook, share videos on YouTube or write reviews
and recommendations on TripAdvisor, which provides major opportunities for destinations to
engage, build trust and more long-lasting relationships (Buhalis and Wagner 2013).
It is evident that by integrating ICTs, tourism providers, tourists and other consumers are able
to co-create experiences and value throughout all stages of travel, including the pre-travel
inspiration, planning, booking stages, during the on-site destination stage and in the post-travel
recollection stage. Mobile technologies particularly benefi t tourists to be constantly connected
and co-create experiences and value with a multiplicity of individuals and places. In this vein,
technology enhanced tourism experiences can be considered a new paradigm for marketing
that maximizes levels of engagement and co-creation with multiple individuals in physical,
online and virtual spaces throughout all stages of travel. In the fi eld of tourism marketing, ICTs
will be the decisive elements for differentiation, innovation and future competitiveness of
experiences. In order for marketers to develop a better understanding of how to create this new
type of experiences, insights can be gained by exploring how these experiences are currently
realized across the tourism industry. For this purpose,
Table 10.2
provides an overview of a
number of best-practice industry examples from which marketers could learn how to successfully
create technology enhanced tourism experiences in practice.
In outlining these diverse use scenarios of organizations from a variety of industries, including
the tourism, hospitality, cruise and aviation sector, it becomes evident that not one single but a
