Making Tourism Technology User-friendly

Abstract

This chapter highlights key experiences in using leading examples of tourism-linked technology during travel. Managerial directions are offered to hospitality and tourism businesses when employing contemporary technology applications. A carefully crafted autoethnographic approach, supported by netnography, provides the basis for the findings and recommendations. Two settings were chosen as iconic cases: exploring the city of Innsbruck and staying in a high-tech hotel in Vienna. The insights revealed that while technology provides advantages for tourists’ stays, less than thoughtful use can also disturb the experiences. The contribution to tourism intelligence from this study lies in the need for technology applications to create well tested, personalized and user-friendly services for diverse tourists and to design a communication system to anticipate problems.