ICT and the Sustainability of World Heritage Sites. Analysis of Senior Citizens’ Use of Tourism Apps

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and applications (apps) for tourists are key tools for the sustainability of World Cultural Heritage Sites (WCHS). Their integration into tourism marketing strategies poses challenges regarding the satisfaction of the expectations of the target stakeholders, particularly senior tourists, people aged 60 and over. This paper adopts an exploratory and descriptive approach that combines qualitative techniques (focus groups), to study the use senior citizens make of ICT and tourism apps, with quantitative ones. In this sense, content analysis has been performed on a sample of tourism apps. The results reveal that ICT are essential tools for senior tourists and positively influence tourists' final perception of the travel experience. The analysis of these mobile apps shows that they meet the expectations of senior tourists, who constitute a relevant generation for cultural tourism and are of special interest for the sustainability of WCHS. The configuration and development of these tools must be adapted to this generation, which we call Generation W.Sustainability 2019, 11, 3203 2 of 17 image and reputation of the destination [11,13]. Thus, RICT contribute to sustainable tourism through their communicational, relational, and experiential capacity [6,[14][15][16]. The value of experience is a key element in the configuration and development of all cultural destinations. The intangible and eminently experiential nature of tourism products and services [7] and the fact that they cannot be tested before they are bought give great importance to the user's experience. In the tourist sector, the key is the experience resulting from all the travel stages: pre-travel (search of information, planning, decision-making), on-travel (experiences resulting from the use and consumption of the product or service, and the relationships established with the host community) and post-travel [9,13,[17][18][19]. In addition, the value of experience has acquired more importance with the arrival of the model 2.0 [19,20] and its potential to multiply the reach of the traditional word of mouth [13,21] and the electronic word of mouth (eWOM), when focused in the digital field [22,23].Having highlighted the importance of RICT in the tourism sector, including the cultural one, there are questions about the uses of RICT among different types of tourists, both real and potential, and, consequently, about the differences between digital immigrants and digital natives [24]. Both segments of the population constitute interesting groups for cultural destination marketing organizations [25][26][27] with different expectations and use of RICT [3,28,29]. To be precise, one of the fundamental questions posed by the literature review is whether the reorientation of the marketing strategies and tourist communication based on the web 2.0 model [1,14,18,[30][31][32][33][34] should pay special attention to the Boomers (50-64 year-olds) and the Silent Generation (65 years and over) [35] or whether, based on the digi...

Gen Y: Emotions and Functions of Smartphone Use for Tourist Purposes

“…Effectively, within the wide range of ICTs, smartphones have revolutionized the way tourists interact with the physical and digital worlds, and have become essential and highly valued tools [36,49,50] thanks to their capacity to shape and enhance the tourist experience [36,42,51,52], which in turn can favor the promotion and dissemination of the destination by tourists themselves through word of mouth (WOM) and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) [53][54][55][56][57][58][59].…”

“…Hence the need is to identify the main uses given to smartphones for tourist purposes according to different generations and the consequent ICTs use habits [36], which is one of the objectives of this study. This information is necessary to successfully integrate smartphones into the digital marketing and communication strategies of tourist destinations.…”

“…Therefore, and given the relevance of Gen Y for tourism [80][81][82] and the impact of smartphone use on the tourist experience [31,36,44,45,51,52,[75][76][77][78][79], this study aims to describe the feelings and emotions that the use of the smartphone and its tourism-related functionalities generates during travel on members of this generation and the correlation between these variables.…”

“…Within the diversity of ICTs, the boom and massive adoption of smartphones among Gen Y [20,[25][26][27][28] as well as the proven relevance of these mobile devices for the tourism sector highlight the need for more studies on this regard to contribute to the development of a still incipient and scarce line of research [18,[29][30][31]. Just like with any other ICTs, the integration of smartphones into the digital marketing and communication strategies of the tourism business should take into account the particularities of the different stakeholders of the destinations [5,17,18,[32][33][34][35][36] to ensure their use actually generates positive emotions and sensations [31,[37][38][39]] that contribute to a different, original, and satisfying tourist experience [40][41][42].…”

The Development of Mobile Tourism in the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Area of Poland

“…This does not only concern the young and middle age, technology-oriented tourists. As a recent study from Spain [78] has shown, the line of age in which tourists use apps has shifted, and senior citizens are a substantial tourist group that uses ICT technologies, mainly in the pre-travel phase, to book accommodation and transportation, and to locate and search for services and products.…”