Services Taxonomy of Tourism Mobile Applications: A Basis for Student Travel Application

Development
Catan, Denmark H
Domingo, Chin-Chin A.
Dr. Buenvenida, Santos

In todays tech-savvy world you would be hard pressed to find someone without a
smartphone, so when it comes to travelling, apps are the perfect companion (Edensor, 2014).
Smartphones are convenient tools to make different actions happen through different mobile
applications. With the increasing number of tourist activities, using smart phones and mobile
applications has been a staple for many travelers.
The use of mobile phones dates back to 1908 when a wireless phone was issued a US
Patent in Kentucky, USA but the story of mobile phones actually began in 1940 when engineers
working at the company AT&T, a telecommunications company, developed cells for mobile phone
as base station (History of Mobile Phones: uSwitch).
With tourism apps being so popular, it is important for the tourism industry as well as mobile
technology developers to have a firm understanding of the landscape of the mobile apps that are
on the market and to see what may be lacking. There are so many tourism-related applications
present in the market today, the questions is, what type of services and features should a student
travel app have? Eden and Gretzel (2012) categorized the tourism-related mobile applications into
Seven (7) categories based on the services these applications provide: Navigation, Social, Mobile
Marketing, Safety/Emergency, Transactional, Information, and Entertainment.
This study focuses on the types of services and features a tourism-related mobile
application should have according to the preferences and needs of students. The researchers
chose to identify the levels of user customization and taxonomy services in terms of personal
preferences, location, navigation, social, information, security, safety or emergency, and mobile
marketing. Also, this study enables to benefit the Mobile App companies in order for them to
enhance the application so that it will fit the needs of students when it comes to tourism-related
activities. The users such as students and companies from the tourism sector will also be benefited
in this research because it will give them easiness and comfort of booking or reserving flights, hotel
accommodation and the like when they travel.
The research design for this study is descriptive that is analysed through quantitative
methods. Questionnaires were also used to evaluate and determine Tourism Management
students preferences in a customise mobile application. The survey is appropriate in this study
because it enables the researchers to formulate generalizations.