The use of mobile applications in mountain spas in Europe
Abstract ID: 3.13929 | Accepted as Talk | Talk | TBA | TBA
Paweł Stelmach (1)
Digitalization also affects outdoor sports practices and related tourism in mountain areas. Visitor relationship channels are an element of destination business models, which also applies to mountain spas. Effective visitor management requires reaching guests with the right information at the right time through the channels they already use (Schwietering et al., 2024). Digital media allow destination managers to develop and implement new methods of digital visitor management (Mangold et al., 2024). There is a need for managers to have access to accurate and up-to-date recreation data on a scale corresponding to the growing scope of recreational areas (Capdevila et al., 2024). Digital information carriers, such as external platforms (often referred to as external applications), offer direct communication and interaction with visitors to natural areas (Schwietering et al., 2024). Taking the above into account, the aim of the work was to identify the scope of use of mobile applications in mountain spa destinations in Europe. The research question was posed: what is the scope of use of mobile applications in mountain spa destinations in Europe? The method is based on: analysis of scientific literature on the subject supplemented with Internet sources, multiple case study and comparative analysis of mobile applications of 121 European mountain spa destinations from 17 countries and 10 most popular mobile applications that are tools for planning and navigation during outdoor activities, conducted on the basis of data from the Google Play platform. The identified differentiation in the use of mobile applications of European mountain spa destinations measured by the number of their downloads allows to distinguish significant and insignificant applications, both popular from the national scale (at the level of thousands of downloads) to the international level (at the level of millions of downloads). The variation in the popularity of mobile applications used by visitors to European mountain spa destinations provides information on the quality of data from these applications and should therefore be the basis for the justification of orders for destinations’ own applications and for outsourcing data from universal applications used for outdoor activities in mountain areas by destination managers.
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