ABSTRACT
Much has been written about the intricate relationship between tourism and technology, and specifically information technology (IT), stressing the importance of technological progress for tourism development, competitive tourism industries, greater global mobility and ever-more sophisticated tourism experiences (Buhalis and Law 2008; Gretzel and Fesenmaier 2009; Hall 2005; Poon 1993; Sheldon 1997; Werthner and Klein 1999). Recent advances in mobile technologies, social media, pervasive computing and artificial intelligence suggest that tourism’s dependency on IT is bound to increase, with tourism experiences being mediated by an ever greater array of devices that provide opportunities to interact with information, services, things and other human beings before, during and after a vacation (Jansson 2007; Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier 2009; Wang, Park and Fesenmaier 2011). Tomorrow’s prototypical tourist is probably not one with a Hawaiian shirt and a huge camera around the neck awkwardly gazing at natives or distant landscapes but an individual with a personal digital device connected to a myriad of information sources, allowing for interactions with a global social network and supporting touristic gazes at an augmented reality that facilitates interactions with the environment in new forms (Gretzel 2010). Thus, the question concerning technology is an important one to ask to understand the future of tourism and to envision the nature of tourists in such a technology-dependent world (Gretzel and Jamal 2009).
