Abstract
The widespread use of mobile devices in daily life activities has impelled a growth in the development of applications (apps) for different purposes. Tourism is one of these spheres of activity in which mobile apps have been developed to support visitors. However, there is not enough understanding of the features that foster the relevance or popularity of a tourism app. Consequently, this paper will analyse the features of specific destination-related apps in Google Play. This analysis will shed some light on generic features of these applications in order to identify potential patterns that correspond to better positioning in searches related to the selected destinations. With this purpose, the research has performed a daily automatic massive collection of data by means of a crawler. Obtained results will provide a brief overview of the characteristics of the most successful applications and could provide some insights in the design and development processes of tourism mobile apps.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps. Last access: 24 June, 2013
- 2.
This is the predetermined version of Google Play according to the location of the researchers.
- 3.
When uploading an app to Google Play, the developer has to classify it according to one of the following categories: Arcade and Action; Books and Reference; Brain and Puzzles; Business; Cards and Casino; Casual; Comics; Communications; Education; Entertainment; Finance; Health and Fitness; Libraries and Demo; Lifestyle; Media and Video; Medical; Music and Audio; News and Magazines; Personalization; Photography; Productivity; Shopping; Social; Sports; Tools; Transportation; Travel and Guides; Weather.
- 4.
An exploratory approach to the differences between the terms Bilbao and Bilbo has shown that the differences are great, because at the time the crawler was implemented the applications responding to the search Bilbo were mostly linked to “The Lord of the Rings” and its character Bilbo Bolson. For this reason, it is the only destination without a search term in Basque.
- 5.
The relevance of a search refers to terms that appear in the description of an application and repetition rate of those terms. Popularity, on the other hand, looks for the number of incoming links referring to the specified term of search.
- 6.
There are only five applications in the paid queries of the terms Gasteiz and Donostia and seven in the paid queries of the term Euskadi.
References
Berger, S., Lehmann, H., & Lehner, F. (2003). Location-based services in the tourist industry. Information Technology & Tourism, 5(4), 243–256. doi:10.3727/109830503108751171.
Bloem, J., van Doorn, M., & Duivestein, S. (2009). Me the media. Rise of the conversation society. Past, present and future of the third media revolution. Amsterdam: VINT.
Gartner. (2013). Gartner says worldwide PC, tablet and mobile phone combined shipments to reach 2.4 billion units in 2013. Gartner News Room. Available online at https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2408515. Last access 2013/09/11.
Grün, C., Werthner, H., Pröll, B., Retschitzegger, W., & Schwinger, W. (2008). Assisting tourists on the move- an evaluation of mobile tourist guides. In S. Ceballos (ed.), ICMB’08. 7th International Conference on Mobile Business 2008. (pp 171–180). Barcelona: IEEE Computer Society, doi:10.1109/ICMB.2008.28.
Jara, A., Lopez, P., Fernandez, D., Castillo, J., Zamora, M., & Skarmeta, A. (2013). Mobile digcovery: discovering and interacting with the world through the internet of things. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, (pp. 1–16). doi:10.1007/s00779-013-0648-0.
Kennedy-Eden, H., & Gretzel, U. (2012). A taxonomy of mobile applications in tourism. E-review of Tourism Research, 10(2), 47–50.
Lamsfus, C., Xiang, Z., Alzua-Sorzabal, A., & Martín, D. (2013). Conceptualising context in an intelligent travel environment in travel and tourism. In L. Cantoni & Z. Xiang (Eds.), Information and communication technologies in tourism 2013 (pp. 1–11). Vienna: Springer.
Martín, D., López-de-Ipiña, D., Alzua-Sorzabal, A., Lamsfus, C., & Torres-Manzanera, E. (2013). A methodology and a web platform for the collaborative development of context-aware systems. Sensors, 13(5), 6032–6053.
Martín-Sánchez, M., Miguel-Dávila, J. A., & López-Berzosa, D. (2012). M-tourism: las apps en el sector turístico. In A. Guevara, A. Aguayo, J.L Caro & A. Cerezo (Eds.), TuriTec 2012. Congreso Turismo y Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones, Málaga: Facultad de Turismo, Universidad de Málaga, 407–424.
Okazaki, S., Andreu, L., & Campo, S. (2011). Servicios turísticos a través del móvil: Aplicaciones en marketing turístico. Investigación y marketing, 110, 48–53.
Shoval, N. (2008). Tracking technologies and urban analysis. Cities, 25(1), 21–28. doi:10.1016/j.cities.2007.07.005.
Siewiorek, D. (2012). Generation Smartphone. IEEE Spectrum, 49(9), 54–58.
Wang, D., Park, S., & Fesenmaier, D. R. (2011). An examination of information services and smartphone applications. In C.H.C. Hsu & M. Li (Eds.), In 16th Graduate Students Research Conference 2011, Houston.
Wang, D., Park, S., & Fesenmaier, D. R. (2012). The role of smartphones in mediating the touristic experience. Journal of Travel Research, 51(4), 371–387.
Wang, D., & Xiang, Z. (2012). The new landscape of travel: A comprehensive analysis of smartphone apps. In M. Fuchs, F. Ricci, & L. Cantoni (Eds.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2012 (pp. 308–319). Vienna: Springer.
Want, R. (2009). When Cell Phones Become Computers. Pervasive Computing IEEE, 8(2), 2–5. doi:10.1109/MPRV.2009.40.
Acknowledgments
This research has been performed in the framework of the Etortek—Strategic Research Programme 2011–2013 and more specifically of the project SmarTUR—El turismo en destinos inteligentes, coordinated by CICtourGUNE. We would like to express our gratitude to all the public states and organisations that have made the development of this research activity possible.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fuentetaja, I.G., Simon, I.Z., Aranzabal, A.R., Ariza, M.P., Lamsfus, C., Alzua-Sorzabal, A. (2013). An Analysis of Mobile Applications Classification Related to Tourism Destinations. In: Xiang, Z., Tussyadiah, I. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2014. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03973-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03973-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-03972-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-03973-2
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsBusiness and Management (R0)