Designing for mobile value co-creation—the case of travel counselling

Abstract

This paper focuses on the development of a mobile service as extension of travel agencies' sales channels, fundamentally driven by the notion of value co-creation. Design goals are directly linked to the understanding of travel counselling as practical value co-creation and to the concern to progress this understanding throughout the travel customer cycle. Customers as well as travel agencies benefit from a mobile service rooted in value co-creation. Mobile service applications which target a service provision which furthermore is in line with the core competency of a travel agency (advice-giving and continuously accompany the customer) are scarce. Taking this as a starting point, we propose a mobile service and system design which provides a travel customer with continuing support on the trip, suitable to complement a lively, ongoing customer-firm interaction which enables the co-creation of value, ultimately targeting increased customer retention and loyalty.

Smart technologies for personalized experiences: a case study in the hospitality domain

“…It is not only the mobility of the technology itself but the increased level of mobility and constant connectedness of the service provider and the individual employees which is critical. This is in line with latest research, which confirms the possibilities of the mobile developments and urges to take advantage of mobile devices for service delivery, as mobile access and wireless become more common (Schmidt-Rauch & Schwabe, 2013). Always-on connectivity will allow for enormous opportunities to enable interactivity and the creation of personalized contextualized, and location based services (Buhalis & Law,Document,page 13/24 2008).…”

“…Yet, the understanding of how tourism businesses can strategically integrate smart technologies to meet the rising consumer demand for meaningful experiences is scarce (Gretzel & Jamal, 2009). While recent work recognises the potential of technologies for more personalized experiences, such as using mobile user devices (Poslad et al, 2001) or mobile tour guides for personalized routes and location-relevant information (Schmidt-Rauch & Schwabe, 2013) studies exploring innovative business models of companies integrating mobile solutions for the personalization of experiences remains scarce. Only the recent study by Neuhofer, Buhalis and Ladkin (2013) tackled the question of how to instrumentalise high-tech for the creation of high-touch experiences.…”

Service encounter thinklets: how to empower service agents to put value co‐creation into practice

“…Schmidt‐Rauch and Nussbaumer () introduced four guiding perspectives for the design of supportive IT artefacts: service encounters as learning process, as design process, as collaboration and as experience. Moreover, Schmidt‐Rauch and Schwabe () describe how value co‐creation can be maintained after the face‐to‐face encounter and introduce design requirements for creating supporting IT artefacts to resolve occurring problems, namely the problem of being limited to verbal dialog, of the stickiness of information needs, of diverging goals and the burden‐of‐choice problem. Nussbaumer et al (, ) discuss how to design IT artefacts to resolve occurring information asymmetries.…”

Value Co-creation and Co-destruction in Connected Tourist Experiences

“…In an attempt to accelerate the co-creation debate, several studies have conceptualised and explored experience and value co-creation in tourism in the digital context (Neuhofer, Buhalis, & Ladkin, 2012;Schmidt-Rauch & Schwabe, 2013;See-To & Ho, 2014). While these and further studies have primarily investigated how technology can be used as a resource to enhance experiences and create added value, little emphasis has been placed on understanding how technology could potentially 'co-destruct' the value in the tourist experience.…”