Travel behavior is becoming inherently dynamic and socially connected because of the increasing use of mobile technologies; as such, the concept of context is becoming increasingly important in travel and tourism and particularly within today’s technology-supported mobile environment. This article builds upon existing literature describing recent developments in context-aware system design with the aim of defining the notion of context as it relates to the mobile technological environment for tourism. As part of this effort, a conceptual framework is proposed to describe the structure and fundamental properties of context, and several implications are discussed for tourism research and the design of mobile systems.

Going Mobile: Defining Context for On-the-Go Travelers

Improving travel decision support satisfaction with smart tourism technologies: A framework of tourist elaboration likelihood and self-efficacy

The majority of today’s information and communication technology (ICT) impact studies disregard infrastructural, organizational, and environmental factors typically responsible for successful e-business adoption and use. This article proposes an empirical approach that shows how the mentioned factors determine both e-business adoption and the impact of information and communication technologies. The research framework is based on E. Rogers’ Innovation Diffusion Theory and is tested with survey data gathered in the Austrian destination management organization sector. By referring to K. Zhu and K. L. Kraemer’s (2005) e-business impact model, the proposed approach explicates how the use of e-business applications may positively affect the performance of tourism organizations. Online survey data are analyzed through a linear structural equation modeling approach.

E-Business Readiness, Intensity, and Impact: An Austrian Destination Management Organization Study

Ever since the beginning of civilization, travel for various causes exists as an essential part of human life so as travel recommendations, though the early form of recommendations were the accrued experiences shared by the community Modern recommender systems evolved along with the growth of Information Technology and are contributing to all industry and service segments inclusive of travel and tourism The journey started with generic recommender engines which gave way to personalized recommender systems and further advanced to contextualized personalization with advent of artificial intelligence Current era is also witnessing a boom in social media usage and the social media big data is acting as a critical input for various analytics with no exception for recommender systems This paper details about the study conducted on the evolution of travel recommender systems, their features and current set of limitations We also discuss on the key algorithms being used for classification and recommendation processes and metrics that can be used to evaluate the performance of the algorithms and thereby the recommenders

An extensive study on the evolution of context-aware personalized travel recommender systems

Mobile guides (based on PDAs, smart phones, or mobile phones) play an increasingly important role in tourism, giving tourists ubiquitous access to relevant information especially during their trip. Due to a more difficult access to mobile applications in a ubiquitous usage environment, based on time constraints, lighting conditions, bandwidth, etc., user acceptance of mobile applications strongly depends on the application adaptation to the concrete usage context. This article presents a framework for mobile applications in tourism, enabling a flexible implementation of adaptive, context-aware tourism applications. The framework especially provides approaches for user interface adaptation, content adaptation (recommendation), and interaction modality adaptation. The framework has been prototypically instantiated and evaluated in two different application scenarios, a city guide for the city of Innsbruck and a skiing guide for the ski resort DolomitiSuperski. Both application scenarios showed high usage rates and customer satisfaction and proved the applicability and effectiveness of the presented approach for developing adaptive mobile tourism applications.

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Context-based adaptation of mobile applications in tourism.

Recommender systems in travel industry make helpful and persuasive product and service suggestions and thus reduce the burden of information overload and domain complexity for users. Within the scope of the etPlanner project we innovate existing technology by considering all trip phases and by supporting next to standard Web interfaces also different mobile devices.

etPlanner: An IT Framework for Comprehensive and Integrative Travel Guidance

The customer nowadays expects ubiquitous access to information exactly relevant to their current context during all trip phases. Information has to be provided in a highly personalised way and has to be accessible anytime and anywhere by any possible devices. Consequently, information systems have to adapt themselves to the current usage context. This paper presents an approach to dynamically adapt ubiquitous web applications in the dimensions of content, design and behaviour to the complete usage context (i.e. user, current situation and used device), making use of an XML-based neutral representation of the web application’s user interface. The paper discusses existing approaches for adaptive systems, presents a generalpurpose adaptation model and a corresponding IT-framework and introduces the application of the proposed approach within the Innsbruck.mobile web application.

Dirk Linke

Papers

etPlanner: An IT Framework for Comprehensive and Integrative Travel Guidance

Context-based Adaptation of Ubiquitous Web Applications in Tourism