A factor analytic approach towards determining mobile tourism services

The tourism sector is one of the world's most important economic sectors, and the increasing popularity of mobile devices presents an opportunity for developing innovative mobile tourism services. While there is much research on the development and evaluation of mobile tourism applications and on generalized tourist needs and behavior, there is little work on understanding the types of services tourists desire. Using a factor analytic approach, this study aims to determine what mobile services are important to the tourists. This was first done via a survey of the literature and confirmed by a focus group. The set of candidate tourism services was then translated into a questionnaire for the purposes of quantitatively determining their appropriateness for mobile tourism. Thereafter, exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic procedures were performed. Our findings show that tourists appear to favor basic services such as those providing information about transportation, accommodation and food, while advanced ones such as context-aware services and trip planning were deemed comparatively less desirable. Practical and theoretical implications of our findings are also discussed.