Social Aspects of Mobile Technologies on Web Tourism Trend

Introduction

The widespread use of Internet and Web technology in every aspect of our daily life has brought great change in the consumers habits in any field but mainly in the tourism sector. Every year, million of tourists approach to Internet in order to find tourist information: vacations, flights, guides, last minute, cruises, destinations and routes. This situation is changing the concept of tourism. In particular, tourism was defined by the World Tourism Organisation as “the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, holidays, business, health treatment, religion and other purposes”.

A new concept of “intelligent tourism” is spreading, based on all those innovative technological solutions offered by Web that allows achieving information on cultural, artistic and other kinds of natural interest.

The Web imposes itself more and more as relevant reference and indispensable resource in the tourism sector both for customers and tourism companies, thanks to undisputed advantages such as:

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  Speed for information exchange,

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  Improvement of interaction among people located in different places,

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  Improvement of information sharing, knowledge and services availability for all the users.

These above three aspects are very important because they are producing the markets globalisation and the spatial and of temporal boundaries break down. Moreover the information and knowledge production and sharing improves both quality development of social inclusion. Moreover, the success of the Web and mobile technologies in the tourism sector is given by very competitive prices, but also by the ability to differentiate the offer, by the improvement of possibility to reach the market niches and by proposing new services with a good usability degree. The user is not a passive subject and when s/he visits a business site s/he knows that s/he will not be able to find negative aspects of a choice. This has brought to the creation of virtual communities where users share their own travel experiences with other tourists and where the potential tourist consumer finds relevant information. The tourist seems in fact to prefer descriptions and testimonies of other people that have already visited that place.

In the next sections we introduce the passage from the old economy to the new economy in tourism sector, in particular we describe how the advent of e-commerce has marked the passage from traditional travel agencies to Internet. In succession we describe the different tools tourist used for Web and mobile and their social aspects. Finally we describe the new scenarios of tourism using the new technologies and how the mobile devices can develop the sustainable tourism, increasing both tourism demand and tourism supply.

From Travel Agencies To Online Tourism E-Commerce

The tourism initially involved an elite activity. In the last years it has beenbecoming a mass phenomenon shared by million of people all over the world, and it has been becoming one of most relevant economic sector of most countries. Data provided by World Tourism Council (1997), in fact talk of seven hundred million of arrivals of tourists all over the world. The tourism represents the 7% of the total occupied people and the 2% of global gross domestic product. It is a dynamic phenomenon, mutable and complex, it can be defined as a “social fact”, it changes with transition of tendencies, of orientations, of necessities and needs of society.

In the past tourists had to go to the travel agencies, i.e. in the physicals commercial places where to plan and buy a travel. These agencies execute activities of reservation and selling of single tourism services or services packages confectioned by Tour Operators. This means that people, have to go to a physical place to use such services. The choice of the agency can be limited by the physical distance. Moreover services obtained depended by operators, by their personal skills and by their limited information.