Gamification. Solutions Dedicated To Tourism Industry And Their Use In Romania

Mobile technologies, applications and solutions in continuous development allowed the creation of a real individual mobile infrastructure and the generation of a new mobile-based client profile to whom companies must continuously adapt. Tourism is one of the most adaptive industries to the tendencies of experiential interactions of the potential client. In case of users of mobile devices, mobile apps and mobile games were easily associated with a background of leisure and entertainment offered by tourism services. For tourism companies the new challenge was to identify new and innovative solutions that offer the advantage of differentiation on the concerned market; thus they conceived adaptive marketing strategies centred on mix of tools that include mobile and travel games and that have brought positive results generating the possibility of integrating and extending them through new gamification solutions. During the last years, the gamification market has recorded an important increase, companies specialised in the development of these solutions extending their offer to cover all types of activities. Starting from these aspects, we considered useful the implementation of a study covering two facets: on one hand, identifying the offer of gamification solutions dedicated to the tourism industry, on the other hand, identifying the Romanian tourists’ demand in their quality of users of these solutions. We consider that the results obtained from the study can offer important sets of information to tourism companies, companies developing gamification solutions and to users of mobile devices in their role as tourists.Journal: The USV Annals of Economics and Public Administration