Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2013) 000–000

5th World Conference on Information Technology

Impacts of GPS-based mobile application for Tourism

Nadire Cavus *, Kathy Kefas
a
Computer Information Systems, Near East University, Nicosia 98010, Cyprus

Abstract

Tourists need guide books and maps to navigate through a new location. This can be a blessing and a curse. Though the
information obtained from maps and guide books can be very helpful, it can also be very bulky and confusing, but with the
rise of GPS-based mobile application, information has become more portable, synthesized and user-friendly. However several
social behaviours in many fields have been heavily modified in the last decade, due to the growth of the Internet and its users.
Although there is a rise in mobile application development for tourists, most of the mobile systems are yet to handle certain
issues like; tourists’ information management, accessibility by tourists and the technical know-how of this applications. This
paper reviews the various benefits of these applications to the economy and to the tourists. It also looked at the various
limitations that may arise or in existence and possible solutions to resolve these difficulties.

© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Selection and peer-review under responsibility of

Keywords: GPS, tourism, mobile applications, tourists, economy

1. Introduction

There has been a rise in the use of mobile devices in certain fields like the tourism sector in recent years,
consequent to the fact that mobile phones are presently the existing platform for ubiquitous computing due to
their accessibility and handy nature (Rodriguez-Sanchez et al., 2013). The recent increase in mobility of tourists
in the world, has led to great interest in tourism flows. In recent times, most researchers emphasizes on balancing
the needs and behaviour of tourists and also the general surrounding (Hall & Page, 2006). Several international
bodies like World Travel Tourism Council (WTTC), the World Travel Organization (WTO), and Eurostat has
brought out quantitative datasets and methodologies for analysing tourism flows since the common quantitative
method for analysing the international tourism flows are inadequate and does not provide sufficient explanations
as regard to the questions and concerns raised (Ahas et al., 2008). With the evolution of geographical information
systems (GIS) and digital databases in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), surveying

* Nadire Cavus. Tel.: +0-392-675-1000

E-mail address: [email protected]
 Author name / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2015) 000–000

techniques in the study of tourism geography has improved, since the GIS and other important visualization
techniques have relevant functions in the tourism sector (Wang & Cheng, 2001; Buhalis & Licata, 2002; Frihida,
Marceau & Theriault, 2004; Lew & McKercher, 2006). The mobile positioning datasets and location-based
services (LBS) are fast becoming relevant aspects of geographical studies (Spinney, 2003; Ahas & Mark, 2005;
Ratti et al., 2006; Ahas et al., 2007). Even with the limitation and prerequisite that the mobile positioning data
experiences with the ICT applications, it still has major prospects for space-time behaviour applications in
tourism and geography (Ahas et al., 2008). It also provides LBS along with wireless functionality for emergency
services (Bisdikian et al., 2001; Giaglis et al., 2002) and location of the nearest emergency, public, private, and
social services as well as the nearest service provider by efficiently using mobile devices involves the process of
creating applications for mobile devices and maintaining connectivity over slow, inexpensive, and unreliable
networks (Burnham, 2001; May, 2001). The manner in which a destination utilizes its resources is of great
relevance, hence the mobile positioning data leans toward supporting the conventional data sources and
destination management (Ahas et al., 2008).

Tourists need guide books and maps to navigate through a new location. Which as stated by Haubl & Dellaert
(2004) can be a blessing and a curse. Though the information obtained from maps and guide books can be very
helpful, it can also be very bulky and confusing, but with the rise of Global Positioning System (GPS)-based
mobile application, information has become more portable, synthesized and user-friendly. However in the recent
decade human activity and actions are influenced by the evolution of the internet, which currently is the major
means of obtaining information in western nations, an example is the dawn of electronic tourism (e-tourism)
from the web which is used for trip planning, travel destinations, etc. (Williams & Palmer, 1999; Werthner, 2003;
Jannach et al., 2007). Nevertheless, most e-tourism sites end up displeasing their users as they present only
booking functionality without sufficient assistance to the users in their search. Most users make no purchase
since it is quite stressful to go through the whole database in search of a desirable product (Noguera et al., 2012).
Hence this paper aims at evaluating the impact and importance of GPS-based mobile application for tourism.

2. Benefits of GPS-based Mobile Application for Tourism

The benefit of GPS-based mobile application for tourism can be categorized under these following headings:

 To the Economy: Tourism generally brings money to every country but it depends on the publicity,
accessibility and affordability of tour trip and information (Ahas et al., 2008). With the aid of GPS-based mobile
application the tourists tends to save more as there will be little or no need to employ the services of a tour guide,
not to talk of the publicity a mobile application creates for tourists. Generally GPS-based mobile application
attracts the tourists due to the affordability and publicity it gives and the more the tourists the more the revenue
for the country.
 To Tourists: GPS-based mobile application provides important travel information like accommodation,
emergency centers, Point of Interest (POI), etc., to tourists, which can also be given according to user
specifications as most systems requests for the user preferences (Horozov, Narasimhan & Vasudevan, 2006;
Ricci & Nguyen, 2007). It is also a good tool that offers alternative routes and tour recommendations to the
nearest POIs for tourists. Based on a user’s location routes are recommended with the aid of navigation systems
and route recommendation services included in some way finding applications for mobile phone users to locate
addresses and attraction sites recommended by the application (Papinski & Scott, 2011; Gavalas et al., 2014).
Some systems have an inbuilt tour planner which aids tourists in planning their day-to-day movement around tour
sites in order to save time and money. Since there are several locations a tourist might want to visit but time and
money might be a great enemy to achieving that (Gavalas et al., 2014). Most social networks grant access to
 Author name / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2015) 000–000

sources of user-generated contents and this attribute attracts and motivates users, having this in mind systems are
structured to aid tourists share their fun and find their way around (Brown et al., 2005; García-Crespo et al.,
2009; Strobbe et al., 2010; Gavalas & Kenteris, 2011; Zheng & Xie, 2011).

3. Limitations and Possible Solutions of GPS-based Mobile Application for Tourist

As relevant as the GPS-based mobile application is to tourists and also to the economy it is faced with some
challenges that limits its ability; these challenges include:

 Power consumption: GPS consumes a lot of battery power on a mobile device. It was verified that in a
continuous use it can consume all the battery power, of a current top range smart phone, in less than 7 hours
(Gaonkar et al., 2008; Kjasrgaard, 2012). Since any GPS-based mobile application will obviously use GPS
massively to locate POIs, hotels, restaurants, etc., an algorithm which is capable of adjusting the GPS updates
(more or less time) in order to minimize battery consumption can be implemented. With this tweak, GPS-based
application should consume less power than it originally does (i.e. using only the GPS-based mobile application,
without calls, etc.), thus, supporting the user for a longer time (Anacleto et al., 2014).
 Trip scheduling: Due to time and/or money tourists rarely meet up with their own expectations as there might
be lots of interesting locations and very little time to visit all of them (Gavalas et al., 2014). Moreover most
tourists find it very difficult to make decisions on where to visit first, when to take meals, how to visit all the
interesting sites and how to cut down on expenses (Yang & Hwang, 2013). Hence the need to have a trip planner
which is rare in most applications, due to challenges in acquiring certain information like when the POIs open,
user preferences, etc. This problem is termed as the Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) and the best solution to
this problem is the implementation of an efficient experimental algorithm in online applications, which should
present recommendations in line with user preference and feasible route choices (Gavalas et al., 2014). However
the presented solution is very tasking as it cannot be solved in polynomial time (Vansteenwegen et al., 2011).
 Network availability: GPS-based mobile application requires a mobile network to aid its functionality and to
assist the mobile device in making position estimate determinations (Mathkour, 2011). Some connections are too
slow they cannot support a GPS-based application and some interesting tourist sites might not have mobile
network. But if the network signal strength is improved and widely spread, it will help the program to run better.
 Usability: Most applications in the market are not user friendly and does not provide precise data, nor allow
multiple ways to access the data, such as map access, application loading and real time feed back to the requester,
hence a need for more user friendly applications be made available (Anacleto et al., 2014).
 Personalizing recommendations for tourists: Different approaches have been implemented in personalized
tourism services which are aimed at aiding the tourists to easily locate places of interest, emergency centres, etc.
These approaches include content based, collaborative, demographic, and knowledge-based or hybrid
approaches, etc., but the most common are collaborative filtering and content-based filtering (Montaner et al.,
2003; Anacleto et al., 2014; Gavalas et al., 2014). Content-based filtering recommends services in line with
analysing the previous actions or purchases of the user’s (Kabassi, 2010), while the recommendations of other
users are used to recommend in collaborative/demographic filtering (Sarwar et al., 2000; Kabassi, 2010).

4. Conclusion

Recent evolution of digital databases and geographical information systems in Information and
Communication Technologies, surveying techniques in the study of tourism geography has improved. The rise in
the use of mobile devices in certain fields like the tourism sector in recent years has consequently led to mobile
phones being the existing platform for ubiquitous computing. In the last couple of years the use of mobile
technologies in some cases, such as tourism, has increased. The recent increase in mobility of tourists in the
 Author name / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2015) 000–000

world, has led to great interest in tourism flows. Bearing in mind the relevance of tourism to the economy,
different tools has been put in place to aid and improve the tourism sector, one of which is a GPS-based mobile
application that aids and attract tourists and also provides publicity to tourism site. This paper however discussed
the impacts of GPS-based mobile application to the economy and to the tourists.

References

Ahas, R., & Mark, U. (2005). Location based services - New challenges for planning and public administration? Futures, 37(6), 547-561.
Ahas, R., Aasa, A., Roose, A., Mark, U., & Silm, S. (2008). Evaluating passive mobile positioning data for tourism surveys: an Estonian case
study. Tourism Management, 29, 469-486.
Ahas, R., Aasa, A., Silm, S., & Tiru, M. (2007). Mobile positioning data in tourism studies and monitoring: case study in Tartu, Estonia. In
proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (pp. 119-128). Ljubljana,
Slovenia: Springer.
Anacleto, R., Figoueiredo, L., Almedia, A., & Novais, P. (2014). Mobile application to provide personalized sightseeing tours. Journal of
Network and Computer Applications, 41, 56-64.
Bisdikian, C., Christensen, J., Davis, J., Ebling, M.R., Hunt, G., Jerome, W., et al. (2001). Enabling location-based applications. In
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Mobile Commerce (pp. 38-42). New York, USA: ACM.
Brown, B., Chalmers, M., Bell, M., MacColl, I., Hall, M., & Rudman, P. (2005). Sharing the square: collaborative leisure in the city streets.
In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 18-22). Paris, France: Springer.
Buhalis, D., & Licata, M. C. (2002). The future eTourism intermediaries. Tourism Management, 23(3), 207-220.
Burnham, J. P., (2001). The Essential Guide to the Business of US Mobile Wireless Communications. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA:
Prentice-Hall PTR.
Frihida, A., Marceau, D. J., & Theriault, M. (2004). Development of a temporal extension to query travel behavior time paths using an object-
oriented GIS. GeoInformatica, 8(3), 211-235.
Gaonkar, S., Li, J., Choudhury, R. R., Cox, L. & Schmidt, A. (2008). Micro-Blog: sharing and querying content through mobile phones and
social participation. In Proceedings of 6th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (pp.174-186).
NewYork, USA: ACM.
García-Crespo, A., Chamizo, J., Rivera, I., Mencke, M., Colomo-Palacios, R., & Gómez-Berbís, J. M. (2009). SPETA: social pervasive e-
tourism advisor. Telematics and Informatics, 26(3), 306-315.
Gavalas, D., & Kenteris, M. (2011). A pervasive web-based recommendation system for mobile tourist guides. Personal and Ubiquitous
Computing, 15(7), 759-770.
Gavalas, D., Konstantopoulos, C., Mastakas, K., & Pantziou, G. (2014). Mobile recommender systems in tourism. Journal of Network and
Computer Applications, 39, 319-333.
Giaglis, G. M., Kourouthanassis, P. K. & Tsamakos, A. (2002). Towards a classification framework for mobile location services. In B. E.
Mennecke, T. J. Strader (Eds.), Mobile Commerce, Technology, Theory, and Applications. Hershey, PA, USA: IGI Publishing.
Hall, C. M., & Page, S. (2006). The Geography of Tourism and Recreation: Environment Place and Space. New York, USA: Routledge.
Haubl, G., & Dellaert, B. (2004). Electronic travel recommendation agents and tourist choice. In Proceedings of Tourism and Leisure
Industry: Shaping the Future (pp. 317-324). Maastricht, Netherlands: Maastricht University.
Horozov, T., Narasimhan, N., & Vasudevan, V. (2006). Using location for personalized POI recommendations in mobile environments. In
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (pp.124-129). Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer
Society.
Jannach, D., Zanker, M. A., Jessenitschnig, M. A., & Seidler, O. (2007). Developing a conversational travel advisor with advisor suite. In
proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (pp. 43-52). Ljubljana,
Slovenia: Springer.
Kabassi, K. (2010). Personalizing recommendations for tourists. Telematics and Informatics, 27, 51-66.
Kjasrgaard, M. (2012). Location-based services on mobile phones: minimizing power consumption. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 11(1), 67-
73.
Lew, A., & McKercher, B. (2006). Modeling tourist movements: a local destination analysis. Annals of Tourism Research, 33(2), 403-423.
Mathkour, H. I. (2011). A GPS-based mobile dynamic service locator system. Applied Computing and Informatics, 9, 95-106.
May, P. (2001). Mobile Commerce: Opportunities, Applications, and Technologies of Wireless Business. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Montaner, M., Lopez, B., & De la Rosa, J. L., (2003). A taxonomy of recommender agents on the Internet. Artificial Intelligence Review,
19(4), 285-330.
Noguera, J. M., Barranco, M. J., Segura, R. J., & Martínez L. (2012). A mobile 3D-GIS hybrid recommender system for tourism. Information
Sciences, 215, 37-52.
Papinski, D., & Scott, D. M. (2011). A GIS-based toolkit for route choice analysis. Journal of Transport Geography, 19, 434-442.
Ratti, C., Pulselli, R. M., Williams, S., & Frenchman, D. (2006). Mobile landscapes: using location data from cell phones for urban analysis.
Environment and Planning B, 33(5), 727-748.
Ricci, F., & Nguyen Q. N. (2007). Acquiring and revising preferences in a critique-based mobile recommender system. IEEE Intelligent
Systems, 22(3), 22-29.
 Author name / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2015) 000–000

Rodriguez-Sanchez, M. C., Martinez-Romo, J., Borromeo, S., & Hernandez-Tamames J. A. (2013). GAT: platform for automatic context-
aware mobile services for m-tourism. Expert Systems with Applications, 40, 4154-4163.
Sarwar, B., Karypis, G., Konstan, J., & Riedl, J. (2000). Analysis of recommendation algorithms for e-commerce. In Proceedings of the 2nd
ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (pp. 158-167). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Spinney, J. E. (2003). Mobile positioning and LBS applications. Geography, 88, 256-265.
Strobbe, M., Van Laere, O., Dauwe, S., Dhoedt, B., De Turck, F., & Demeester, P. (2010). Interest based selection of user generated content
for rich communication services. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 33(2), 84-97.
Vansteenwegen, P., Souffriau, W., Vanden Berghe, G., & Van Oudheusden, D. D. (2011). The city trip planner: an expert system for tourists.
Expert Systems with Applications, 38(6), 6540-6546.
Wang, D., & Cheng, T. (2001). A spatio-temporal data model for activity-based transport demand modelling. International Journal of
Geographical Information Science, 15(6), 561-586.
Werthner, H. (2003). Intelligent systems in travel and tourism, In Proceedings of the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (pp. 1620-1625). San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kaufman Publishers Inc.
Williams, A. P., & Palmer, A. J. (1999). Tourism destination brands and electronic commerce: towards synergy? Journal of Vacation
Marketing, 5, 263-275.
Yang, W., & Hwang, S. (2013). iTravel: a recommender system in mobile peer-to-peer environment. The Journal of Systems and Software,
86, 12-20.
Zheng, Y., & Xie, X. (2011). Learning travel recommendations from user-generated GPS traces. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems
and Technology, 2(1), 2-29.