Mobile technologies Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Mobile technologies in Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Mobile technologies in Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Problem Statement

Mobile services are part of the introduction of new technology possibilities in business and in various industries. The early introduction of mobile commerce (or m-commerce) in the late 1990s created a momentary hype, which turned out to be counter-productive for a serious industrial adoption of the possibilities offered by mobile technology. Scholars and industry representatives turned their attention towards the promise of electronic wireless media, envisaging that the next, or the real, phase of ecommerce growth will be in the area of mobile commerce. Keen and Mackintosh (2001) stress that mobile commerce (m-commerce) is marking the start of another era of innovation in business and that m-commerce will continue to extend the way organizations conduct business, changing the relationships between companies, customers, suppliers and partners. According to Keen and Mackintosh, mobility means freedom, and freedom creates choice and value, something much more than convenience as it may revolutionize the way companies work, buy, sell and collaborate. Keen as well as Mackintosh go to the core of the possibilities offered by the mobile technology but the next steps to be taken to make use of the possibilities are not well understood as it appears that we need to know much more about the actual value-adding mechanisms of the users of mobile technology.

Challenges & Opportunities

Although the mobile Internet appears to have much to offer as an instrument of commerce, not much is known about the consumers' willingness to adopt wireless electronic media (for some partial answers cf. Carlsson et al 2002, 2004 and 2005) and about the factors that influence their adoption decisions and value perceptions of mobile services. With a bit of hindsight it appears that the wireless Internet raises many of the same questions as the introduction of the fixed internet. Building successful strategies for the mobile marketplace begins, no doubt, by recognizing the distinctive forces driving the emergence of mobile services. On the Internet, firms can create value for customers in a manner which is different from conventional business. Correspondingly, mobile services possess unique characteristics - Keen and Mackintosh (2001) call them “the mobilisation of knowledge” - when compared to e-commerce, and many statements on an impending m-revolution have, in fact, been triggered by the assumption that mobile services will involve (i) lower barriers and (ii) greater benefits in comparison to both e-commerce and traditional commerce. In view of that, the key question is to find some way to assess the value of mobile applications to prospective users, and to gain an understanding of the factors that may delay the penetration of the mobile Internet on a larger scale. In diffusion theory (Rogers 1995), adopters are categorized into five groups on the basis of innovativeness: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Socioeconomic characteristics such as age, education and social status influence adoption.

Those adopting mobile services now are innovators, early adopters and probably also early majority ...