Digital Gifts and Tourism Mementos

Digital Gifts and Tourism Mementos: Comparison

Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Yvaine Wei and Version 1 by Evangelos Sakkopoulos.

Touristic destinations all around the world are struggling to digitally transform the touristic experience and the touristic products they offer and to capitalize a good experience with new tourists and returning ones. It is possible for various lines of business to come together and work along one another for an improve touristic experience using mobile technologies in a personalized, targeted approach.

digital memento
digital souvenir
e-memento
e-souvenir

1. Introduction

Tourism in many countries is one of the key elements of their economy and contributes a large percentage to these countries’ respective GDPs. It is no coincidence that in such countries the use of touristic goods such as climate conditions, gastronomic habits, points of interest and attractions should be exploited for economic development and identifying these goods can be a possible way out of an economic crisis. It is also no coincidence that tourism directly and indirectly provided 25% of Greece’s GDP in 2018 ^[1] amid an economic recession, while in 2019, tourism showed a record rise for the country. In 2020, tourism contributed to the recession from the effects of the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus due to its large contribution to the country’s GDP during the previous years ^[2]. Other countries and regions have seen changes in the behaviour of touristic experiences due to the pandemic, too ^[3].

2. Designing a Digital Memento

A digital memento that will serve as a dynamic postcard of the personalized experience in the routes and visits taking place while in vacations is proposed. The visitors are usually taking picture along routes they may follow that later need further organization and processing. The solution was designed and implemented contributing the following to the industry:

Guided process to assist users in taking a photograph (e.g., selfie) while on a trip;
Automatic creation of an e-souvenir ^[4], a collage of landscape and selfie photos, provided as a digital cart-postal;
An open platform that gives the photographers and graphic designers the means to express themselves and create cart-postal images that will later be personalized for a user;
An ecosystem for digital organization of memories that accompanies self-guided tour apps.

When the user selects to create the e-souvenir, the stored images are returned to the user as a single digital memento for sharing or storing, giving a memorable uniquely personalized digital postcard following the general process outlined in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Transformation flow and e-souvenir creation.

For the best touristic experience, various lines of business should come together and collaborate to achieve the best result. This experience reaches far more than one person, or one company. Many different skills have to be put together, so that the tourist receives a memorable experience. In Figure 2, the various skills needed are shown.

Figure 2.

Business collaboration. How various lines of business interact for the final touristic experience.

3. Related Work

3.1. Touristic Memorable Experience

Tourism is a phenomenon that offers visitors memorable experiences ^[5]. These memories and customer experiences lead to successful tourism products ^[6]. However, from a practical point of view, the design and implementation of memorable experiences for tourists is a problematic situation due to the personal point of view and the character of each consumer ^[7]. It has been shown that memory can be identified as an important dimension to the tourist experience ^[8]. The concept of originality is of paramount importance in understanding the tourist experience ^[9]. Originality can also be a stimulus for a tourism activity, when designing it ^[10].

If, at the end of the trip, when recalling the experience and evaluate it, surely the more original, special and descriptive the souvenir is, the more special our memory will be. Definitions of originality in psychology can be synonymous with something we do not expect, that can be complex, atypical, uncertain and generally something we have not experienced before [13]^[11]. Originality in tourism has been defined as the extent to which the experience differs from the visitor’s expectations [14]^[12]. So, in this age of easy communication and sharing of experiences, the age of the wisdom of the masses with social media reviews, it seems that while the souvenir has changed from the past and will always change form, at the same time, it will be legitimate for every traveler.

3.2. Personalized Printed Posters and Media Package Souvenir Appification

Sakkopoulos et al. ^[4], in 2005, presented how appification had been introduced to describe the rapidly widening shift from web browsing to the usage of smartphone apps for Internet-based information access and e-services consumption. This work showed how user involvement can be increased when, instead of buying a physical souvenir from a museum, a personalized e-souvenir ^[4] can be formed and acquired by the user combining ready-made photos and videos into a single multimedia package. This is the first time that the user intervened into forming a representation of their own memories into a digital token. However, no further personalisation has been included. It is also shown how QoS assurance techniques enable efficient media delivery through smartphones to assist making the old-fashioned shopping souvenirs go online and become virtual. Kunieda et al. [15]^[13] presented a way of how collaboration of various sectors, institutes and organizations could produce a regional problem-solving information system through an agile development process model. They addressed problems such as local advertisements (with KadaPos), travel diaries (with KaDiary) and tourist guidebooks (with KadaPam). All three solutions offered a personalized information brochure printed out for each problem. So, the person interested in the solution could reach a predefined physical printing system and receive the aforementioned brochure. In this case, personalisation has been used to produce a final printed product—a map—and no digital transformation is employed at the end-users’ hands but only for the backend.

4. Solution Architecture

4.1. User Experience—Top Tier

The top tier (Presentation layer/user interface), as presented in Figure 3, will be visible to the user. Through this level, the user browses, defines his options and receives the results of his personal preferences and choices. To support all clients, a web application with the principles of PWA (Progressive Web Applications) is employed, providing flexibility and giving the look and feel of a locally installed (native) application.

Figure 3. User Interface. Abstract representation of how the mobile device communicates with various local resources.

4.2. Web API—Middle Tier

Any communication goes through the intermediate level of services, the Web Application Programming Interface (WebAPI). In multi-tier solutions such as the one that is presented here, this layer holds the intermediate position and is referred to as the middle layer or middle tier, as depicted in Figure 4.

Figure 4.

Middle tier. WebApi and System Services.

4.3. Repositories—Bottom Tier

Following the top-down analysis approach, there is the third level, which is responsible for the data, both for extraction and storage, as well as their physical retention in a database Figure 5. In order to detach the functions of database communication from the database itself, there are the repositories that take up this role.

Figure 5.

Middle tier. WebApi and System Services.

References

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