Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
“We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe.”
Richard Bach
Understanding the principles and contemporary practices of gamification in the tourism context is critical for successful tourism development. Tourists seek novel and authentic experiences, uncommon for their everyday life (McKercher and Prideaux 2020; Skavronskaya et al. 2020). The trends of the recent years (Buhalis and Sinarta 2019), as well as the forecast for the future travel demand (Amadeus IT Group SA 2015) demonstrate the growing importance of tourists participation in travel activities in addition to passive learning and observing them. The potential of incorporating the elements of games in a tourist customer journey in creating advanced tourist experience and promoting destinations has been recognised widely recognised (Kim et al. 2021; Xu et al. 2017; Bulencea and Egger 2015). The book “Gamification for Tourism” provides a cutting-edge overview of games and gamified experience in tourism, developed to help readers to develop general understanding of the gamification potential for tourism, and to generate ideas for successful gamification strategy.
Designing advanced tourist experience requires theory-driven and actionable frameworks, developed for specific contexts (Xiang and Fesenmaier 2017). The first part of the book focuses on the theoretical background, necessary for creating games in a travel customer journey. It defines gamification and gaming motives, explains game thinking and the logic of developing gamified experiences, and finally, conceptualizes the pros and cons of incorporating the elements of a game in a non-game context such as tourism. Such knowledge is crucial for developing a sustainable strategy for gamified experience in tourism.
The second part of the book summarizes up-to-date cases of gamification in specific contexts. Tourist demand for services and resulting experiences are highly context-dependent (Volchek et al. 2020). The book provides its readers with examples of gamified services in tourism, hospitality, airlines and restaurants, in several countries, types of tourism and, importantly, applied technology to enable a gamified experience. Each of these factors defines tourist experience in a specific context (Buhalis et al. 2019). Exploring the success factors and the challenges of applying different games and technologies for tourists, is a background for articulating ideas for specific destinations.
The key advantage of the book “Gamification for Tourism” is the combined comprehensive overview of the key theoretical concepts of gamification and the relevant practical cases of gamified experience creation in the tourism context. Such a combination makes the book suitable for multiple stakeholders. First, it is beneficial for tourism-related study programs as students can learn the specifics of a gamified tourist customer journey and develop an understanding of the advantages and limitations of gamification for tourism. Second, the book can be valuable for tourism industry practitioners. It provides an overview of contemporary practices and can help in generating ideas and designing innovative solutions. Last but not least, the book represents a valuable source for academic researchers as it provides a high-quality and concise review of the state-of-art gamified tourist experience. Therefore, it will be great to see this book is updated with new theoretical concepts and cases in several years.
Given the growing demand for co-created novel and memorable experience, and the capabilities of digitalization to support it, the book “Gamification for Tourism” is a valuable source of theoretical and empirical knowledge for tourist academicians and practitioners, who search for innovative ways to design advanced tourist experience.
References
Amadeus (2015) Future traveller tribes 2030: Building a more rewarding journey. Amadeus IT Group, Madrid
Buhalis D, Sinarta Y (2019) Real-time co-creation and nowness service: Lessons from tourism and hospitality. J Travel Tour Mark 36:563–582
Buhalis D, Harwood T, Bogicevic V, Viglia G, Beldona S, Hofacker C (2019) Technological disruptions in services: lessons from tourism and hospitality. J Serv Manag 30:484–506
Bulencea P, Egger R (2015) Gamification in tourism: designing memorable experiences, BoD–Books on Demand, Norderstedt
Kim Y-N, Lee Y, Suh Y-K, Kim D-Y (2021) The effects of gamification on tourist psychological outcomes: an application of letterboxing and external rewards to maze park. J Travel Tour Mark 38:341–355
Mckercher B, Prideaux B (2020) Tourism theories, concepts and moels. Goodfellow Publishers, Oxford
Skavronskaya L, Moyle B, Scott N (2020) The experience of novelty and the novelty of experience. Front Psychol. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00322
Volchek K, Law R, Buhalis D, Song H (2020) Exploring ways to improve personalisation: The influence of tourist context on service perception. E-Rev Tour Res 17:737–752
Xiang Z, Fesenmaier DR (2017) Big data analytics, tourism design and smart tourism. Analytics in smart tourism design. Springer, Berlin, pp 299–307
Xu F, Buhalis D, Weber J (2017) Serious games and the gamification of tourism. Tour Manag 60:244–256
Funding
Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
I declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Volchek, K. Book Review "Gamification for Tourism". Inf Technol Tourism 24, 157–159 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-021-00209-2
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-021-00209-2