Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
39
Tourism marketing goes mobile
Smartphones and the consequences
for tourist experiences
Scott McCabe, Clare Foster, Chunxiao Li and Bhanu Nanda
Introduction
Tourism is going mobile. This statement might seem grammatically tautological but until
relatively recently, many of the online aspects of travel and tourism that are beyond the
trip experience, including: search for ideas and inspiration, recommendations and relevant
information, refl ection and sharing stories and photos and so on, were characterized by their
spatial fi xity. Society's increasing dependence on the Internet and digital social media in
particular pretty much dictated a fi xed location, in that consumers needed to be at their desktops
or within access of an Internet connection via a laptop in order to engage and communicate
online with their social networks and tourism businesses and destinations. However, as other
authors in this volume have alluded to, recent developments in smartphone technology, adoption
and use are changing the rules of the game in which all businesses, including tourism businesses
and destinations, operate.
Social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter as well as travel-related websites,
such as TripAdvisor have had to readjust the basis for their business models, as they come to
terms with the fact that many of their customers access their sites from mobile devices, which in
turn affects advertising capabilities. Smartphone adoption globally heralds a paradigm shift
in m-commerce with consequent marketing impacts. For example, one of the authors of this
chapter attended a UK travel industry briefi ng on mobile applications in 2010, at which travel
industry executives around the room argued they were holding off investment decisions in
mobile applications and business development because at the time they complained that they
could not see the revenue potential. That situation has rapidly evolved. According to a recent
report, marketing research analysts Forrester noted that mobile paid advertising and search
surpassed email
and even
social media in 2011 for the fi rst time (in the US), and forecast a
38 per cent compound annualised growth rate until 2016, to over $8 billion, far outstripping all
other areas of interactive marketing spend (VanBoskirk 2011).
However, it is the way in which consumers have embraced smart mobile technology since the
launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007 (although smartphones had been in existence since around
2000, largely spearheaded by Nokia), that is really driving business development and marketing
issues. TripAdvisor launched its mobile site in 2010 and has reached over 26 million downloads
