Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
consumers used smartphone applications in their tourism activities and the possible effects on
tourist experience. Initial questions sought to ascertain respondents' use of the Internet for
a range of activities in their daily lives (information search, email, social networking,
downloading music or movies, fi nancial work [banking etc.], checking news, sports, weather
reports, purchase travel related services, or purchasing tickets for events). Next, we asked if
respondents shared travel experiences online using a range of channels (social networking,
writing travel blogs, writing travel reviews, participating in travel forums, or uploading
photographs). The survey went on to ask about the frequencies of trips for business and
leisure undertaken in the last year, as well as the most recent trip and sought to understand
whether respondents had accessed the Internet during their most recent trip, for specifi c
types of activity and through which channels, including their smartphones, but also via their
hotel, Internet cafes and so on. Final questions asked about smartphone ownership, whether
non-users intended to buy a smartphone in the near future, whether users had accessed the
different types of applications identifi ed earlier, and which of them they thought they were likely
to use in the future.
An email link was sent to a representative sample of UK residents, via a commercial partner,
Experian UK, a leading global information service. Experian are the UK's leading supplier
of consumer email databases for market research purposes, with a UK consumer database of
45 million people. The sample consisted of around 105,000 UK consumers and was distributed
in September 2010. A total of 3,503 respondents opened the email of which 780 clicked through
to the survey link. This yielded a total response of 635 respondents completing the survey, of
which 611 completed all sections including the demographic profi le questions. There are
limitations with this response set, as the profi le of respondents was skewed towards the older
demographic profi le, however the study yielded interesting results particularly in comparing
smartphone users with non-users in terms of their user characteristics and secondly, the smaller
response set of smartphone users did broadly correspond to smartphone ownership rates in
the UK at the time and the demographic profi les for users.
Descriptive analysis such as frequencies was run fi rstly to obtain basic information for each
variable. Crosstabulation was then used to compare the difference between groups on nominal
variables such as the use of each travel related smartphone application for leisure and business
trips. In order to understand if there were any differences between smartphone users and non-
users, the Mann-Whitney test was performed on how often people used the Internet for each
activity and how likely they would use the ten smartphone applications in the future. Both
questions are ordinal data which required a non-parametric test. In addition, a factor analysis was
run on the ten travel-related smartphone applications.
Sample
There was a fairly even proportion of males (56 per cent n=340) to females (44 per cent n= 271).
The demographic was skewed towards the older age groups with around 85 per cent (523)
people over 45, with 32 per cent (195) of those over 65. A high percentage of respondents
classifi ed themselves as retired (47 per cent). This may account for the fi nding that leisure trips
are taken much more often than business trips. Around 70 per cent respondents take a few leisure
trips per year (27 per cent stated between one to two, and 43 per cent between three to fi ve
leisure trips per year). Compared with leisure trips, only 14 per cent of respondents take one or
two business trips and 7 per cent take three to fi ve business trips.
