Hello everyone. In this paper we are going to present the app Tourgether, which is a
tool we can use to explore whether tourists’ real-time sharing will encourage other tourists
to visit Points of Interest they did not plan to visit.
Research shows that visiting a novel place brings travelers satisfaction, however people
usually visit places they’ve already been to. Studies show that this is because people
lack awareness of nearby places that they haven’t been to and do not know whether
they are worthwhile to visit. To enhance users’ awareness, we’ve designed and developed
Tourgether, which leverages the idea of crowdsourcing where tourists can share their real-time and
in-the-moment experience with other tourists in the same area.
Tourgether is a mobile application that allows tourists to check-in to places to share their
experiences by means of uploading photos and adding reviews about the place they were at,
similar to how they do in social media applications. Tourists in the same region can see the check-ins
through the News Feed page as well as on the tourist map. They will also be notified about
popular Points of Interest and check-ins around them.
We ran through four formative studies to iteratively improve Tourgether and obtain insight about
how people use Tourgether and whether it encourages people to visit more diverse places on a whim,
not just stick to their original plan or visit famous locations. In addition, we conducted
a field experiment to investigate whether seeing real-time experiences encourages people
to visit places they did not plan to go to, as compared to online comments that may not
have been posted recently.
Next, we will be presenting several highlights of our study. For more details of the study
results, please refer to our paper.
First, in our formative studies, we found that 6 out of 10 most visited POIs were those
that are categorized as “less popular” or “least popular” in travel related information
sources. This suggests that when people are able to see real-time experiences, they tend
to visit more diverse places, and are no longer limited to only visiting famous locations.
This also suggests that people can be more willing to visit new places when real-time
information is available to them.
We also investigated tourists’ motivations for checking in to a place during their travels.
While some people might just want to create records of their journey so that they can
review it later, others think that they and other tourists belong to same community and
therefore would want to proactively help others to enhance their travels.
In the field experiment we mentioned earlier, we compared 2 cases, one involving real-time
check-ins, the other with only comments, which we downloaded from online travel websites.
We refer to the latter group as the baseline group and found that the real-time group visited
more POIs they did not plan to go to than the baseline group did, in terms of either
the total number of visits or the ratio of unplanned visits to all visits.
Moreover, what we found more interesting is that the influence of seeing real-time experiences
depends on a person’s travel style. More specifically, we found that the influence
of being able to see real-time updates and reviews was larger on those who planned to
visit many places than on those who planned to visit only a few places. Specifically,
for those who planned a lot, when they saw only online comments they only visited about
2 POIs they did not plan to go to, whereas those who were in the real-time group visited
about 5 places they did not plan to go. This significant difference was not seen among
those who did not plan a lot. This same pattern is also seen in the ratio of unplanned visits
to all POI visits. The main reason for this difference is that those who don’t plan
beforehand like to explore new places they did not plan to go on their own. Thus, many
of the unplanned visits were initiated by themselves, whereas active travel planners
who like to follow their own travel plan only went to unplanned POIs because they saw the
real-time check-ins.
The same pattern is also seen in this figure. For example, for those who plan less, we can
see that only 11% of their unplanned POI visits was preceded by viewing check-ins. In contrast,
for those who plan more, 25% of their unplanned POI visits were preceded by viewing check-ins.
This again confirms that those who plan more tend to explore more by themselves, and thus
a lot of novel places that they visit were initiated by themselves. On the other hand,
if we look at how much the participants’ check-in views were converted into real visits,
the figure shows that those who plan less are twice as likely to convert their check-in
views to actual visits as those who planned more. This also implies the openness of those
who plan less to visiting new places.
In conclusion, our results show that exposing tourists to real-time travel experiences from
other tourists in the same region will prompt them to visit more places they did not plan
to go. This in turn gives many unpopular places the opportunity to be discovered by
more tourists. From looking at people’s motivations for posting their experiences
online, we can see that leveraging crowdsourcing to encourage exploration is promising. However,
we also found that this influence depends on how open the tourists are to visiting new
places if they see experiences by other tourists. Our paper provides a more detailed explanation
of our results so please read our paper if you are interested. Thank you for your time!