The number of Korean abroad traveler is largely increasing in every year. In particular, the proportion of Foreign Independent Travel (FIT) tourists is increasing every year, and in the case of 20s, it accounts for more than 70%. FIT tourists plan and...
The number of Korean abroad traveler is largely increasing in every year. In particular, the proportion of Foreign Independent Travel (FIT) tourists is increasing every year, and in the case of 20s, it accounts for more than 70%. FIT tourists plan and carry out their own schedule by themselves throughout the whole trip before departure. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are the factors of greatly reduced the barriers to entry into this social phenomenon. Especially smartphones have become popular in the 2010s and many services are being provided for FIT tourists. However, not all mobile tourist information services are provided in good quality, and FIT tourists choose only few. Two preliminary surveys for this study found that 77.8% of respondents said they used the maps service most usefully. Therefore, this study focused on mobile maps services (Google Maps, etc.).
The concept of tourism flow has been studied by various scholars since the introduction of flow theory. However, most of them were aimed at tourists with a specific purpose, especially those who enjoy extreme sports, so it was difficult to generalize the research results to ordinary tourists. Also, many studies have explored only the factors that have positive relationship with tourism flow so there is a lack of research on the factors with negative relation.
The purpose of this study is to examine how the quality of mobile maps services affects the tourism flow of FIT tourists who have traveled mainly for general leisure purposes. Specifically, I studied at how perceived information quality and perceived system quality are related to perceived tourism risks and perceived tourism information distress, which are interrupting factors of tourism flow, and perceived challenge and perceived skill, which are preconditions, and then I examined how these four factors are related to tourism flow. As a result, perceived system quality, which of the mobile tourism information service had a negative relationship with the interrupting factor of tourism flow, and there was a positive relationship with the precondition factors. Also the interrupting factors of tourism flow had a negative relationship with tourism flow, and the precondition factors of tourism flow had a positive relationship with tourism flow.
In this thesis, I have studied not only about tourism risks but also the relationship between distress caused by tourism information and tourism flow. Although tourism risks had been discussed by many prior researchers, but there has been only little discussion of distress from tourism information. As a result of analysis of the causal effects using the IBM SPSS AMOS structural equation, perceived tourism information distress had positive effect on perceived tourism risks, and it had negative effect on tourism flow also.
Therefore, the results of this study is provide various sources of research that can diversely derived from mobile tourism information services, perceived tourism information distress, and tourism flow through other studies in the future. Especially, the possibility of various interrupting factors of tourism flow is raised. And it also provides a starting point for ICT and tourism-related companies to determine what factors they need to focus on creating and delivering mobile services for FIT tourists.