D.R. Fesenmaier

Temple University | TU · School of Tourism and Hospitality Management

As technology advances and the level of information utilization improves, there has been rising popularity received by the application of technology in tourism, especially when it comes to smart tourism. In such circumstances, this study aims to understand smart tourism design through a complex system theory. This is a precondition to forming a sor...

Design is now considered a crucial activity in contributing to the success of tourism enterprises as well as destinations. This article builds upon the ideas first introduced in the two edited books, namely Design Science in Tourism and Analytics in Smart Tourism Design, which brought the conceptual and methodological foundations for designing tour...

This essay serves as a response to Cai and McKenna’s Letter to the Editor (2020) recently published in the Journal of Travel Research, which sought to initiate a discussion regarding the nature and future of research related to information technology and tourism (ITT). The authors argued that ITT is a subfield of information systems (IS) and ITT re...

Understanding the nature of tourism experiences holds the key to effectively managing tourism destinations. Research in psychology, economics, geography, marketing and, more recently, services management, offers new insight into consumer experiences which are defined by moment-to-moment and as discreet (and summarized) events. This paper synthesize...

This study proposes that the structure of visitor flows within a destination significantly influences the overall economic value generated by visitors. In particular, destination network metrics (i.e., density, in-degree centralization, out-degree centralization, betweenness centralization, and global clustering coefficient) for 29 Florida counties...

The core product of tourism is experience and therefore is inherently emotional in nature. As such, online storytelling has become an essential destination promotion strategy as it effectively conveys information while at the same time builds emotional connections with potential travelers by encouraging imagination and involvement. Understanding an...

This chapter discusses measurement techniques which enable researchers to examine the role of human senses in touristic experiences in natural environments. To achieve this goal, we provide a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary review of existing studies, focusing mainly on eight sensory modalities that are related to touristic experience creation. A...

This chapter provides a foundation for developing practical applications of wearable devices and related technologies for the tourism industry. It is posited that technologies related to the quantified self perfectly match the needs of context-relevant information and therefore offers a number of opportunities to shape tourism experiences. As such,...

This chapter opens the discussion of analytics in tourism design by introducing its conceptual and technical foundations. It focuses attention on how information technology is transforming the tourism experience and consequentially the needs and opportunities for us to measure and interpret this experience. In addition, it provides an overview of t...

In this final chapter we conclude the book by arguing that big data analytics in inherently connected with the recent emergence of tourism design and smart destinations, which is a logical result of the advancements of IT and its wide adoption in both consumer market and the industry over the last 20 years. And while big data analytics serves as a...

This chapter argues that experiences are dynamic and emotional in nature and should be conceptualized as a series of ‘micro-events’ during the trip. Further, the advent of new sensor technology provides new tools for understanding the ways in which these experiences—events are perceived and the meanings created hold great promise in addressing a nu...

This chapter introduces design science in tourism (DST) as a framework which can guide both the theoretical foundations and applications in tourism design. It is argued that since 1972 when Clare Gunn first published Vacationsape huge progress has been made which now provides the theory and tools needed to support DST. This chapter discusses the co...

Travel behaviour has changed considerably over the past 25 years as the internet, social media and mobile systems have become integrated into our everyday lives. In particular, the nature and extent of information search is one of the most important aspects of travel behaviour effected by these advancements. This study assesses the impacts of these...

This book explores the impact of design science and design thinking on tourism planning, gathering contributions from leading authorities in the field of tourism research and providing a comprehensive and interconnected panorama of cutting-edge results that influence the current and future design of tourist destinations. The book builds on recent f...

With recent developments in social media and mobile computing, little is known regarding how different travel segments within the general traveler population actually use the Internet for travel planning. In particular, this study examined various aspects of Internet use among four generational groups including the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers,...

Mobile systems have become important tools enabling tourists to navigate an uncertain world. A critical examination of the literature suggests that work is needed to develop a holistic understanding on the smartphone use for travel. The results of this study confirms that the use of smartphones for travel is shaped by complex interactions between c...

The influence of the Internet on our social and economic life is well documented. However, few studies have been conducted to assess how travelers have adapted to the Internet over time. Using a series of national surveys conducted over the past 6 years (2007-2012), this study describes important changes taking place in the use of the Internet by A...

This study builds on previous research examining the concept of travel decision flexibility based on theories related to adaptive decision making, which argue that travelers perceive different levels of flexibility depending on the trip-related decision. The results of this study indicate that there are two distinctive types of decision flexibility...

The smartphone penetrates many facets of everyday life, including travel. As such, this article argues that since travel can be considered a special stage of technology use, understanding how the smartphone shapes the tourist experience cannot be separated from the way it is used in one’s everyday life. On the basis of a study of American travelers...

Many destination marketing organizations in the United States and elsewhere are facing budget retrenchment for tourism marketing, especially for advertising. This study evaluates a three-stage model using Random Coefficient Logit (RCL) approach which controls for correlations between different non-independent alternatives and considers heterogeneit...

With recent developments in technology including social media and mobile computing, the Internet offers many tools for today’s travellers. Based upon a large six year study of American travellers’ use of the Internet, this study identifies the strategies travellers develop in response to the complex technological environment over a period of time....

Destination management organizations (DMOs) must understand the pattern of traveller activities within a destination and how this creates value in order to design competitive destinations. It is posited in this study that it is useful to conceptualize traveller activities as a value creation network formed by the interactions of visitors and destin...

Understanding the use of online channels for travel planning is one of the most important challenges facing destination marketing organizations (DMOs). The results of this study found that travellers tend to use a small number of online channels and that there is a strong hierarchical pattern in their use. The results also indicated that the use of...

With the huge amount of information available on the Internet and the increasing importance of online search, understanding the tourism domain is essential for effective online marketing. This study focuses on the semantic representation of the tourism domain with respect to information provided on tourism-related Web sites and travelers' informati...

Purpose Destination recommender systems need to become truly human‐centric in their design and functionality. This requires a profound understanding of human interactions with technology as well as human behavior related to information search and decision‐making in the context of travel and tourism. This paper seeks to review relevant theories that...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to estimate the extent (mean and range) of non‐response bias in online travel advertising conversion studies for 24 destinations located throughout the USA. Design/methodology/approach The method uses two weighting procedures (i.e. post stratification and propensity score weighting) to estimate the extent of no...

Mobile phones have evolved to be smart computers (smartphones) supporting a wide range of information services that can be accessed anytime and from (almost) anywhere. With the increasing number of users and greater incursion into people’s life, smartphones have the potential to significantly influence the touristic experience. This study explores...

The recounting of lived experiences is a central component of the tourism consumption process. However, reaching a wider audience with one’s travel tales has traditionally been restricted to privileged narrators who had access to official publishing channels. Consumer-generated media (CGM) allow for the distribution of travel narratives to a broad...

Search engines have become one of the primary tools for travel planning and, as such, have become an important element in the marketing efforts of destination marketing organizations. Recently, it has been demonstrated that because of the dynamic relationships among search engine providers, the tourism industry, and travelers, it is essential that...

The Internet has become the primary channel for the purchase of a number of travel-related products including airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rental, tickets to events and attractions, etc. This study examines the pattern of travel-related products purchased online by American travelers. The results of this study indicate that there is a s...

A conceptual model of travellers’ unplanned attraction visits is proposed based upon the literature related to intention–behaviour discrepancy and prospect theory and a survey of 551 travellers was used to test the proposed model. The results of the study indicate that unplanned en route decisions are significant parts of travel in terms of the num...

The Tourism Education Futures Initiative (TEFI) seeks to provide vision, knowledge, and a framework for tourism education programs that promote global citizenship and optimism for a better world. This article provides background on TEFI, its inception, its development and its future. The article argues that a fundamental shift in tourism education...

Using tourists’ stories to promote destinations is believed to be an innovative approach in destination marketing. This study conceptualizes and investigates the effectiveness of such an approach. This study supports the underlying premise of introducing narrative in marketing, that is, the narrative reasoning that human beings possess with which t...

Using tourists’ stories to promote destinations is believed to be an innovative approach in destination marketing. This study conceptualizes and investigates the effectiveness of such an approach. This study supports the underlying premise of introducing narrative in marketing, that is, the narrative reasoning that human beings possess with which t...

Travel style has been shown to be a useful concept for understanding travelers. In this study it is argued that the portfolio of trips (specifically, the portfolio of various trip styles) one takes can be used to describe his/her overall travel persona. Network analysis was used to examine the structural relationships between types of trips based u...

Search engines are playing an increasingly dominant role in providing access to tourism information on the Internet. As such, it is argued that destination marketing organizations (DMOs) must have a substantial understanding of the visibility in search engines in order to create competitive positions within this important marketplace. The goal of t...

Search engine marketing (SEM) has become an important strategic tool for online destination marketing. Because of the dynamic relationships among travelers as information searchers, search engines, and the online tourism domain, the authors argue that a new dynamic model must be developed that captures these relationships to better inform SEM pract...

Search engines have become a central part of the internet marketing strategy of tourism businesses and, as such, it is essential that destination marketing organizations have a substantial understanding of how search engines are used within the travel planning process. This study proposed a three stage framework for examining how online travellers...

Search engine marketing requires a substantive understanding of the dynamics of the search system in the travel information search context. The goal of this study is to explore the dynamic nature of online information space through Google as well as its direct impact on the traffic of a destination website. Utilizing a computer program to track Goo...

Tourism has become a major source of employment, revenue, international awareness and opportunity in European cities. As competition among cities grows for visitors as well as for public and private financial support, the efficiency of management in city tourism organizations becomes increasingly important. This chapter aims to examine the nature o...

Search engines are playing an increasingly dominant role in providing access to tourism information on the Internet. As such, it is argued that destination marketing organizations (DMOs) must have a substantial understanding of the visibility in search engines in order to create competitive positions within this important marketplace. The goal of t...

This article performs a content analysis on the first 10 volumes of Information Technology & Tourism. A total of 144 articles are classified by six different categories. To identify trends and patterns in themes, the analysis is split into various periods. The objectives of this study include taking a look at the history of the journal to see what...

With the growing amount of travel-related information available on the Internet and the increasing significance of search in the travel planning process, understanding travelers' search patterns can provide useful insights into developing systems that effectively address travelers' information needs. This study utilized phone inquiry records to exa...

With the huge amount of information available on the Internet and the increasing importance of online search, understanding the tourism domain is essential for effective online marketing. This study focuses on the semantic representation of the tourism domain with respect to information provided on tourism-related Web sites and travelers’ informati...

This study investigated the factors influencing trust in travel-related CGM and, in turn, the degree to whcih trust affects the benefits and impacts of using CGM in the course of planning pleasure trips. An online survey of US Internet users was conducted with a total of 1170 individuals responding to questions regarding their perceptions and use o...

The emergence of new media using multimedia features has generated a new set of mediators for tourists’ experiences. This study examines two hypotheses regarding the roles that online travel videos play as mediators of tourist experiences. The results confirm that online shared videos can provide mental pleasure to viewers by stimulating fantasies...

Narrative as digital word‐of‐mouth has the potential to be an effective way to market tourist destinations. Using narrative structure analysis, this study identifies key marketing elements from tourists' blogs that include characterization, space categorization, and overall product and experience evaluation. The introduction of a blog writer as a p...

This research examines the persuasiveness of destination Web sites through an investigation of users' first impression. To achieve this goal, it builds on research by Fogg (2003) and by Kim and Fesenmaier (2007) to assess the effect of the design factors of destination Web sites on first impression formation. The results of this study indicate that...

With the growing importance of the Internet for travel planning, understanding the online domain of tourism is vital in order to identify the challenges and potential solutions for effectively marketing travel destinations. This study focuses attention on understanding the representation of the tourism domain on the Internet. Analyses of search res...

This paper aims to provide meaningful guidance for the development of human-centric travel decision-aid systems (TDAS). Issues related to TDAS are framed by who, why, when, what, and how questions and a summary model for designing a TDAS is proposed. It is suggested that TDAS needs to be adaptive to individual and dynamic in terms of what to recomm...

While experiencing space and time at a destination, tourists interact with people and artifacts to create meaning and sense of their experiences. Narratives are the ways in which they communicate, recall and enact the lived experiences of travel. This study deconstructs elements of tourists' narratives to provide insights about the narrativistic at...

The purpose of this study is to use existing theories of technology and organizational change to assess the impact of technology implementation within the context of the tourism industry. The framework is applied as a case study to analyze the perceived implications of implementing a destination marketing information system by the Baltimore Area Co...

While experiencing space and time at a destination, tourists interact with people and artifacts to create meaning and sense of their experiences. Narratives are the ways in which they communicate, recall and enact the lived experiences of travel. This study deconstructs elements of tourists' narratives to provide insights about the narrativistic at...

Using search engines for travel purposes has become increasingly important on the Internet. However, the domain of tourism is complex and fragmented and thus gives rise to many problems in information search. This study provides a comparative analysis of the languages of the tourism websites represented through search engines and travel related que...

This study uses pattern language theory in order to identify patterns of tourists’ interactions within their social networks while they are experiencing tourism destinations. The patterns were conceptualized from sequences of tourists’ stories and observers’ field notes through narrative analysis. The identified patterns were then organized into a...

This paper discusses tourist activated networks as a concept to inform technological applications supporting dynamic bundling and en-route recommendations. Empirical data was collected from travellers who visited a regional destination in the US and then analyzed with respect to its network structure. The results indicate that the tourist activated...

New mobile phones and navigation devices are very powerful. In this paper an ethnographic approach is used to gain insight in how one of these devices, a multimedia-phone with GPS, maps and a mobile guide is used by visitors to the city of Philadelphia. An interesting finding is that some of the visitors seem to substitute traditional information s...

This book provides in-depth empirical reports on specific topics within five general areas of tourism management and marketing: (1) scanning and sense making; (2) planning; (3) implementing; (4) evaluating actions/process and performance outcomes; and (5) administering. Offering descriptions, tools and examples of tourism management decision making...

This chapter provides an overview of developments which have resulted in an increased availability of text data, thereby creating greater interest in analysing text in the context of tourism. The first section of the chapter discusses different approaches to text analysis. Specifically, the chapter compares and contrasts qualitative and quantitativ...

As a marketing tool recommender systems have the potential to provide relevant and highly personalized information to consumers. However, developing effective recommender systems requires a substantive understanding of consumers’ preferences as well as meaningful ways to represent hospitality and travel products. This paper argues that language hol...

Benchmarking has been studied as a tool for comparatively evaluating the performance of tourist destinations. However, existing research is limited in that benchmarking is rarely linked with organizational strategy and thus, its potential as a management tool has yet to be fully realized. This paper argues that benchmarking should be considered as...

The fragmented nature of the tourism industry requires a substantial degree of coordination and collaboration among the variety of different players in destination marketing. However, the studies on partnerships and collaboration have taken very narrow perspectives of cooperation relationships and therefore, none of them individually can explain th...

Narrative as digital word of mouth has the potential to be an effective way to market tourist destinations. Using ethnomethodology, this study identifies key marketing elements from narratives which include characterization, space categorization, and overall product and experience evaluation. The introduction of a blog writer as a personal characte...

Innovation has become an increasingly important issue for tourism businesses. The goal of this study was to evaluate innovation in Web marketing by American convention and visitors bureaus and the contribution of website features to the overall success of their Web marketing programs. The results indicate that innovation in Web marketing has been l...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework describing the persuasive architecture of tourism websites. The components included in this framework are organization, consumers, and industry that are in continuous communication with each-other. The organization uses a set of persuasive features to persuade consumers to purchase or remain on the site. A...

The design of websites can be a powerful tool to influence information seeking and choice. Recent studies have indicated that designing websites which evoke a favourable first impression is extremely important. The goal of this study was to investigate the key design factors in the formation of impressions towards web interfaces. An empirical study...

Information technology has made it imperative for destination marketing organizations to adapt their traditional business models in order to keep pace with emerging advertising strategies, changes in the consumer market, and growing competition. This paper reports on a study of the eBusiness models used by 555 American convention and visitors’ bure...

This netnographic study explores first-person stories from online personal travel reports to gain an understanding of tourist experiences. This study uses these stories in order to model tourist spatio- temporal movement at the destination within the context of their tourist-activated networks. The stories provide information about the behavior of...

This netnographic study explores first-person stories from online personal travel reports to gain understanding of tourist experiences at local destinations. This study interprets stories in order to map and model tourist spatio-temporal movement at the destination and analyze tourist activated networks. The stories present diverse information abou...

Summarizes changes in travel consumer behaviour facilitated by technological innovations.

Threats in the external environment and changes in the industry’s markets and structures have challenged destination marketing organizations to change in fundamental ways. The strategic responses to these developments are essentially decisions to proactively shape, adapt to, or passively struggle through a crisis. Envisioning the future of tourism...

This study examines international tourists’ multicity trip patterns within the United States. Actual and perceived distance from the country of origin to the destination is assumed to affect the likelihood of multicity tourism behavior. In addition, higher opportunity costs for first-time tourists are expected to lead to increased multicity pattern...

An emerging area of study within technology and tourism focuses on the development of technologies that enable Internet users to quickly and effectively find relevant information about selected topics including travel destination and transportation. This area of tourism research and development is generally referred to as destination marketing/reco...

Travel decision-making is a complex and multi-faceted decision process and is critical for understanding travellers' trip-planning activities. It includes decisions regarding destination, attractions, timing, transportation and activities. Among the many sub-decisions that comprise a trip decision, destination choice has been considered the core co...

An emerging area of study within technology and tourism focuses on the development of technologies that enable Internet users to quickly and effectively find relevant information about selected topics including travel destination and transportation. This area of tourism research and development is generally referred to as destination marketing/reco...

Based on relevant literature in tourism, consumer behavior, communication, and information science, this study provided a conceptual model of online tourist search and investigated the micro-level process of vacation planning on the Internet. The results indicate that tourists’ planning can be deconstructed into a series of episodes and chapters re...