Social media plays an increasingly important role in travel information seeking and decision-making. However, there is limited understanding of how a group of tourists use social media to plan trips collaboratively and the different practices between countries. In this study, we investigated the collaborative information seeking (CIS) and sharing behaviours of mobile social media users from Australia, Bangladesh and China. Specifically, we surveyed a total of 219 participants to explore the differences in CIS behaviours when people were planning a group trip. The findings suggest significant differences among three countries in terms of the motivations of using social media, CIS activities and social interactions outside the group. Key findings include Bangladeshi and Chinese travellers preferred known contacts on social media, while Australian tourists intended to use both known contacts and user-generated contents for seeking information. The findings also show that social interactions employed by individuals are considered as an important complement of and are interwoven with in-group CIS; both contribute to tourism information seeking. Finally, we propose a framework for CIS research in the tourism domain.

HTTP adaptive video streaming has become the de facto standard for media data delivery in the Internet. Mobile users are increasingly accessing video streaming services while traveling in fast-moving vehicles (e.g., public transport). The inherent high-speed mobility in these scenarios escalates bandwidth uncertainty and seriously degrades the performance of HTTP adaptive video streaming. This paper proposes a location window based geo-intelligent adaptive streaming algorithm, which adapts to the geo-spatial bandwidth variations experienced by a fast-moving user by adjusting the quality of the next chunk based on the estimated bandwidth at the next X locations of the mobile user. In order to realize geo-intelligence, we introduce a neural network model for accurately creating bandwidth maps that store location-specific bandwidth knowledge. By incorporating both these contributions in conjunction with real-world mobile broadband bandwidth traces from a metropolitan area, we present a systematic study to explore the effects of varying the size of the location window on the user-perceived Quality of Experience (QoE). The evaluation results demonstrate that an optimum location window can be identified, which can almost entirely eliminate playout buffer underruns, thus leading to a smooth and high-quality streaming experience.

This paper explores the motivations for employing social interactions on social media during collaborative information seeking (CIS) in group trip planning. We conducted interviews with nine groups of tourists. The analysis identified three motivations for employing social interactions on social media while planning a group trip: finding and gathering information, scheduling the trip‐related activities, and cross‐checking of ideas. The findings also suggest that such interactions on social media contribute to group trip planning through improving the productivity of group information seeking and making better group trip planning.

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Collaborative work among tourists is a topic of ongoing interest in information seeking area, and such activities are constantly evolving as technology advances. This paper explores the characteristics of a tourists group's activities during tourism information seeking. We conducted interviews with nine groups of tourists. The analysis identified four main characteristics of collaborative information seeking (CIS) activities in group trip planning process: initial co‐planning on the trip, seeking and sharing of information, prioritization of choices, and collaborative decisions. The findings of CIS characteristics will help CIS developer and tourism service operators to integrate new customized features and strategies to support group trip planning.