Determining services for the mobile tourist

The increasing popularity of mobile devices presents an opportunity for developing innovative mobile tourism services for tourism-related organizations. While there is much research on mobile tourism applications and on tourist needs and behavior, there is comparatively less work on studying the types of services they desire. The present study aims to determine mobile services that are important from the tourists' perspective using a factor analytic approach. 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 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.