Szilvia Bíró-Szigeti’s scientific contributions

Purpose – For Generation Z (born after 1995) tourism during the summer usually means visiting festivals (especially music festivals) or seeking for extraordinary experiences. For them, the classical tourist attractions are not satisfying and interesting anymore. The aim of the paper is to examine experience factors based on models from the literature review and understand the internal connections among the experience dimensions in the case of music festivals in Hungary. Design / Methodology / Approach – For testing the suggested model based on the literature review and previous researches, a quantitative primary research was conducted. A structured questionnaire was used focusing on five factors of experience economy in case of Hungarian music festivals. The data was collected by an online survey via LimeSurvey, and PLS-SEM path analysis was used to interpret the acquired data. Findings – As a result of the quantitative research significant connection appear among the five experience factors in the field of festivals like other previous researches suggested in other fields. Education, entertainment and escapism experience can be built on aesthetics and economic value – the fifth experience factor – can be built on these four factors. Originality of the research – Knowing how experience factors are based on each other and how they can influence each other is an important factor for festival managers to create an optimal and balanced mix of experience for visitors. By achieving this memorable experience and long lasting memories of the event can be reached.

Many cities in Hungary have an application specially developed for smartphones that try to satisfy both the needs of tourists and local residents. These "products" are based on different objectives of city marketing and destination marketing: their goal is to make shorter or longer stays more comfortable, provide faster and more personalized information, help consumers to turn their offline experiences into online experience sharing and to provide a platform for two-way communication between local and touristic consumers. In addition to the marketing literature review related to smartphones and local tourism experiences, this paper presents the results of a quantitative questionnaire focusing on the needs of Generation Z concerning application functions. Based on the quantitative results, the members of Generation Z are classified into three main groups with the k-means cluster analysis. Among the groups, there are significant differences between the functional requirements of city marketing applications, and according to the size of the groups three main application types and two main ways of software development can be distinguished. The results also show that there are four main group of functions and connected to the different clusters application functions appear together in the needs of consumers. However, the analysis and comparison of the related data together show also that there are only small differences concerning demographic and device-usage variables between the groups defined by the k-means cluster analysis, and this requires more research methods to be conducted in the future based on the results of this exploratory survey research.