Millennial Tourist Emotional Experience in Technological Engagement at Destination

Abstract

Millennial is known to be the generations that strongly empowered by technologies that apparently had altered the pattern of their consumption habits to shape a new form of tourist market. The great incursion of technology on Millennial does not only mediates the experience formation at destination, instead provide added value and emotional impact through its cognitive stimulation and experience co-creation possibilities. As the key instrument for experience enhancement, mobile technologies support users' needs of on-site information, virtually connect tourism providers and consumers, and unfold destination uniqueness. These in turn allow co-creation of tourist experience through satisfaction of Millennial's addiction of connectivity. Virtual connectivity seems to create new form of affective attachment, through which Millennial are emotionally bonded to the place due to the intensity of technological engagement. Consequently, instead of tourist-destination encounter per se, technological experience is potentially classified as the third aspects that dictate experience development, especially among Millennial travellers. Existing literatures indicates that Millennial strong engagement with virtual platform is capable to manipulate their on-site emotional experience, which apparently changing the conventional way of tourist experiencing the destination. Nevertheless, the significant of Millennial's technological engagement towards their destination emotional experience is still open for debates. Pertaining to this situation, this conceptual paper is attempted to understand the influence of technology in the enhancement of emotional experience, specifically among Millennial travellers, in better understanding the evolving demand of the new generations tourist from psychological perspective.

Gen Y: Emotions and Functions of Smartphone Use for Tourist Purposes

“…Gen Y respondents have confirmed they experience, to a greater extent, negative feelings and emotions, which is one of the characteristic features of nomophobia [68,70,71,74]. This situation occurs mainly among the youngest age segment (16)(17)(18)(19), while the older age groups claim to experience greater indifference. It can be concluded that as their years of coexistence with the web 2.0 model decrease, their emotional involvement with the use of smartphones during travel also decreases.…”

“…Regarding the tourist functionalities under analysis [84], most users claimed to use them frequently, being "Learn about destination" the least used. There are also intragroup differences in this regard, because the youngest age group (16)(17)(18)(19) uses these functions the least, suggesting an area of opportunity for DMOs, which can enhance the use of these functionalities to influence the feelings and emotions Gen Y associate with smartphone use during travel. In fact, the results allude to a behavior among the youngest segment of the Gen Y that suggests that their smartphone use for non-tourism purposes during travel sometimes generates negative emotions and feelings.…”

“…It is therefore concluded that smartphone use during travel affects the youngest tourists and is not a key element for the rest age groups. There is a clear need to enhance the tourism use of the smartphones among the youngest group (16)(17)(18)(19), to promote the creation of positive feelings and emotions. The intermediate age group (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29) uses the tourist functionalities frequently and is characterized by a more neutral emotional behavior.…”

“…As Richards [7] points out, Gen Y (as this generation is often referred to) is a market segment of great value to tourist destinations due to the economic potential and availability of its members to travel more frequently and for longer periods. The professional and academic fields have shown great interest in this generation, which is reflected in the recent publication of a remarkable number of research works, both general in scope [2,3,[8][9][10][11][12][13] and specific to the tourism sector [5,[14][15][16][17][18]] The latter sector is particularly interested in this generation's use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for tourism purposes [19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

Managing-technology enhanced tourist experience

“…Technology has transformed ways of how experiences are created (Crouch and Desforges, 2003) and it turned travelers into experience seekers. Millennials and Generation Z have played a significant role in this paradigm shift (Mohd et al, 2019), which leads to the development of digital tourism ecosystems (Benckendorff, Xiang and Sheldon, 2019, 22). Although tourist experiences are still only rudimentarily understood, they require further investigation (Cutler and Carmichael, 2010; Larsen et al, 2019) and are even questionable to some degree (Gretzel and Jamal, 2009), although some of them have already been technology-mediated (Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier, 2009).…”