Factors Affecting the Adoption of Gamified Smart Tourism Applications: An Integrative Approach

Abstract

Abstract:Considering that the core concerns in sustainability are threats to the survival of humankind and the ecosystems that humans depend on, changing the consumption and production behaviors of individuals and society is inevitable. However, people are reluctant to change their own behavior in support of sustainability goals. This tendency seems to be especially strong in tourism because the main value of tourism is hedonic utility. Thus, the tourism industry is now introducing gamification and smart tourism to shift tourist behavior toward sustainability, but most of studies and practices only focus on the performance and application of gamification without considering customer adoption patterns and perceptions during the process. This study empirically investigated what factors affect the adoption of smart tourism applications that incorporate game elements, using the Google Maps tourist guide program. As an initial approach, we incorporated diverse theoretical approaches: perceived usefulness; perceived ease of use; perceived enjoyment from technology acceptance model; information and interaction motivations from the uses and gratifications theory; the network effect; distributive justice; flow as responses to the game characteristics of smart tourism applications; and information privacy concerns as a negative factor for diffusion. The result showed that hedonic characteristics of the gamified smart tourism application (GSTA) are strong in adoption. Perceived enjoyment had a significant influence on the intention to use, but information quality, related to cognitive experience, did not. The flow and perceived distributive justice associated with the game content were not significant, but the interaction motivation was significant in the research model. The results of this study show that individuals regard a GSTA as a low-level game tool. Also, it is important to preoccupy the smart tourism application market in terms of marketing strategy because the network effect is relevant to both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment. We also found that the need to provide personal information would negatively affect the adoption of a gamified smart tourism application.

Communication Factors Affecting Tourist Adoption of Social Network Sites

“…Thus, tourists found that social networks could also serve their information-seeking purposes. However, the results differed from the findings of Yoo et al [38], which found no significant effect on the intention to use. The results may relate to the characteristics of particular media, which conform to the intense information consumption of the industry.…”

“…Information-seeking, relationship maintenance, and entertainment motives had statistical effects on the intention to use SNSs for trips. These results supported the prior findings that entertainment and relationship maintenance motives affected the behavioral intention [38,39,72]. Tourists found that social networks provided them with benefits in terms of entertaining and connecting with people who had a similar interest in traveling.…”

“…Erawan [30] studied changes in privacy issues in mobile technology and found that informative gratification positively influenced advertising value. Yoo et al [38] studied customer adoption patterns of gamified smart tourism applications and found that hedonic or entertainment motivation positively influences the intention to use gamified smart tourism applications. Koo et al [6] studied the relationships between media exposure and destination travel intention and found that both mass media and social networks positively influence destination content gratification or motivation while motivation has a positive influence on the desire to travel and intention to travel to a destination.…”

How to Encourage Recycling Behaviour? The Case of WasteApp: A Gamified Mobile Application

“…This result indicates that the user does not expect high-level game attributes and, thoroughly, high levels of emotional stimuli are not required from an application whose ultimate goal is recycling promotion [23].…”

“…However, since both the social and hedonic aspects seem fundamental in an application based on gamification, the extended TAM, as well as the Self-Determination Theory (SDT), have been used to support the hypotheses that will be presented [22]. As Changsok [23] argues, gamification applications in smart tourism have an inherent hedonistic value of game mechanics.…”