TOURISM AND TECHNOLOGY: THE FUTURE

Technology has a crucial impact on Tourism today. Tourism in itself is being shifted from visiting to experience based visiting and travelling. As per the existing literature, tourist’s inclination towards experience based touring has taken a rise and this might change the authentic behaviour of a tourist. However, mobile technology is gaining momentum and tourism sector is not left much behind in order to provide new technology for tourists through mobile phones. Thus the debate continues on the tourist use of digital media which leads to shift in authentic behaviour of the visitor.# My research put in the effort to examine the tourist use of digital media in different phases of their trip and which all type of applications do they use. The research complies of dataset made available from Horizon Digital Economy Research on 635 respondents from all over the UK. The results showed 136 smart phone users and different type of applications used by them; being directional services application received the maximum number of replies. Statistical analysis was conducted on few variables and significance was very interesting. The study discusses authentic behaviour of a tourist with ranging technology available to them today however focus of the research remains to be the Tourist and Technology: The Future