• Title/Summary/Keyword: Free Independent Travelers (FITs)

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Exploring the Movements of Chinese Free Independent Travelers in the U.S.: A Social Network Analysis Approach

  • Lin Li;Yoonjae Nam;Sung-Byung Yang
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.29 no.3
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    • pp.448-467
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    • 2019
  • In a new age of smart tourism, free independent travelers (FITs) choose their travel routes in a more diversified and less predictable way with the aid of smart services. This paper focuses on the movements of Chinese outbound FITs in the U.S. in the year of 2018. 110 places to visit (destinations) extracted from 122 travel routes recommendations on Qyer.com, a major online travel community in China, are analyzed with social network analysis (SNA). Based on the results of SNA, employing degree centrality, eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality, network visualization, and cluster diagram methods, some preferred cities and natural attractions outside city centers (i.e., New York City (NYC), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Niagara Falls) are identified. Moreover, it is found that NYC in the East and Los Angeles in the West play a major role in the movements of Chinese FITs. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on tourist destination movements and provides valuable implications for smart service development in the tourism and hospitality industry.

React Native and Android Mobile Apps for Smart Tourism Information Service to FITs

  • Cho, Hyun-Ji;Lee, Jin-Yi;Park, Tae-Rang;Jwa, Jeong-Woo
    • International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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    • v.14 no.2
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    • pp.63-69
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    • 2022
  • We develop a smart tourism information system that provides smart tourism services to free independent tourists (FITs) through various content distribution channels such as mobile apps, Instagram, YouTube, and chatbots. The smart tourism information system provides location and storytelling-based tourism information, accommodation, restaurant information, and recommended travel products so that tourists can create a travel itinerary based on personalized situation awareness. The smart tourism information system also provides smart tourism services using commercial maps, navigation, and weather forecast APIs from the Korea Meteorological Administration to provide smart tour guide services to tourists who travel according to the travel itinerary. In this paper, we develop the React Native app that provides smart tourism services provided by the smart tourism information system. The smart tourism React Native app has implemented two methods: a method that directly connects to the smart tourism information system, and a method that provides services by interworking through the GraphQL Query Language developed by META (Facebook). The smart tourism React Native app implements OSMU (One Source Multi-use) by providing tourism information from mobile apps, photos from Instagram, and drone videos from YouTube as an integrated UI.