An analysis of services for the mobile tourist

Abstract

Mobile tourism services have become an essential tool for supporting tourists around the world. Our research aims to identify desirable and undesirable features for mobile tourism services from the tourists' perspective. Focus group discussions and surveys were conducted to gather tourists' needs, exploring the problems faced. This paper presents our findings highlighting desirable design features being maps and transportation information, and unpopular features such as gaming activities. The results also reflect differences in preferences between business/leisure travelers and frequent/infrequent travelers. We believe results of our work are useful in providing design insights for mobile service providers when deciding on features to be included in tourist-friendly information-rich systems, and the types of services customized for specific tourist groups. Copyright 2007 ACM.