Context-Based Adaptation of Mobile Applications in Tourism

Mobile guides (based on PDAs, smart phones, or mobile phones) play an increasingly important role in tourism, giving tourists ubiquitous access to relevant information especially during their trip. Due to a more difficult access to mobile applications in a ubiquitous usage environment, based on time constraints, lighting conditions, bandwidth, etc., user acceptance of mobile applications strongly depends on the application adaptation to the concrete usage context. This article presents a framework for mobile applications in tourism, enabling a flexible implementation of adaptive, context-aware tourism applications. The framework especially provides approaches for user interface adaptation, content adaptation (recommendation), and interaction modality adaptation. The framework has been prototypically instantiated and evaluated in two different application scenarios, a city guide for the city of Innsbruck and a skiing guide for the ski resort DolomitiSuperski. Both application scenarios showed high usage rates and customer satisfaction and proved the applicability and effectiveness of the presented approach for developing adaptive mobile tourism applications.