Visitors reluctant to use new technology for tourism information

Tourists are reluctant to use their mobile phones to research their trip while on holiday and are more likely to carry printed travel guides than read a travel blog, according to the recent research.

Conducting research on how to encourage visitors to get out of Australia's major cities and into regional areas, a study by Dr Deborah Edwards and Anja Hergesell from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), shows that people book most of their accommodation and travel before they leave home.

In a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, Dr Edwards, a Senior Research Fellow in the Management Discipline Group in the UTS Business School, explained "if we want to influence these decisions about where to visit, we have to reach overseas tourists before they leave home, not wait until they get here."

The research, funded by a partnership grant with Destination NSW, aimed to ascertain what encourages visitors to spend time in regional NSW and the barriers to such trips, in part by analysing tourists' social media posts about their holidays.

Tourism is a big business for NSW, with visitors contributing more than $27 billion in total expenditure in the 12 months to December 2013, according to Destination NSW.

Overseas visitors are a lucrative market that injects 'new' money into the economy but most of that money stays in Sydney.

Dr Edwards says tourism is an industry that is sometimes taken for granted and is not always recognised for the revenue it generates for an economy.

She adds "what we hope eventually to do is create a trail, a visual map, of where people go in regional NSW. That would be a really powerful tool."

To do this, two nationally renowned institutes – the Advanced Analytics Institute at UTS and the SMART Infrastructure Facility at the University of Wollongong – are collaborating with Professor Edwards and Hergesell.

Dr Edwards told the Sydney Morning Herald, "the tourism industry wants to know if people use their smartphones while travelling to research things they want to see and do.

"But we found that traditional sources of information such as travel books and information centres are still very popular. To use your phone overseas, you need a local sim card, and you have to have lots of pages open.

"However, while travelling, some visitors use their phones for social networking and it is at this interface that AAI and SMART are assisting us."

Interviews with overseas tourists after they returned from regional NSW found people had travelled out of Sydney mainly because they wanted to see more of the state and to experience nature and beaches.

Those overseas tourists who did not venture into regional areas said they did not have enough time, did not know what to see or had made other plans.

According to Dr Edwards, identifying patterns of behaviour, movement and the range of places tourists visit, as well as examining transport and trip planning, will help regional centres improve visitor experiences and attract a greater share of the tourism pie.

Material in this news item was oringinally story written and produced by the University of Technology, Sydney, for Brink, a publication distributed monthly in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Click here to view the original news item from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Images used for illustrative purposes only.

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