This year, 5 masterstudents presented their papers at the ENTER-Conference in Rome. Here a short video why you should put effort in writing your research paper (2nd Semester – eTourism Theories and 3rd Semester eTourism Research)
Copy & paste for hotel mobile websites? Or: The power of screen sizes
This is a project-summary from Melanie Fraiss, Sofiya Iliycheva, Mattia Rainoldi and Roman Egger
The growing popularity of mobile devices and their extended usage for travel and accommodation booking, have affected both the behavior of consumer and the development of the Tourism and Hospitality Industry (Buhalis & Law, 2008; Egger & Buhalis, 2008; Neuhofer, Buhalis & Ladkin, 2012). During their analysis in 2015, eMarketer predicted that by 2016 that 51.8% of all travel online bookings will come from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets (eMarketer, 2015). All this together possesses a big challenge for the developers of hotel mobile websites. Using responsive website design (RWD) to tailor the content of hotel websites to devices with different screen sizes might not be enough. Due to the fact that little attention has been given to the importance of hotel mobile websites, the aim of this paper is to explore the differences of usability and content of hotel mobile websites in the context of devices with different screen sizes. By means of a true experiment involving an eye-tracking study, think aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews, the findings of this research show that while hotel websites used RWD to ensure a uniform visual appearance on both smartphones and tablets, some major differences still emerged in terms of content importance and usability. It is recommended that in order to ensure customer satisfaction, hotel mobile websites should be designed separately for different mobile devices.
Emerging Technologies in Tourism
The technology wheel seems to spinn fast again, as we are entering the new year soon. Sabre Labs (which is the travel and technology lab within Sabre) just published a new study on emerging technologies, challenging the tourism industry within the next decade. This report is for agencies, airlines, hoteliers and travelers, and aims to provide an overview which specific actions you should consider in the near future.
Download the full report here
Fellow of the ICE Award
Prof. Roman Egger was recently awarded for the “Fellow of the ICE Award”. He received this honoured award at the annual meeting of the ICE in Lucern for „Outstanding academic contribution to Tourism, Hospitality, Education, Training & Research“. Thank you very much for this award!
New Master-Thesis Topics
During October the first Master-Thesis workshop with the students writing their theses in the division of eTourism took place. The students work on exciting topics such as the incorporation of bots in a hotel communication software, voice assisted search in destinations, a guide for virtual reality in tourism, fairness of online pricing as well as the development of a gamification app for an Austrian mountain destination. The students will surely come up with very interesting findings – we’ll keep you posted! 
Virtual Reality Summit 2016
Last Wednesday more than 400 VR interested and enthusiasts met at the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg to learn more and discuss about Virtual Reality as well as Augmented and Mixed Reality. If you did not have the chance to join, we provide a short review: VR Summit Salzburg 2016.
Check out or VR in Tourism Blog!
… and here a report on Salzburg Heute 09.10.2016 – ORF
European Commission Crowdfunding Workshop 2016
The European Commission Crowdfunding Workshop 2016 took place in Graz this September. Leading experts from all EU Member States and selected further experts were invited by the European Commission to a workshop in order to exchange views on the current state of crowdfunding across Europe. Amongst them our former student Igor Gula who presented his idea “How would you promote European tourism? The ETC ideas competition” as well as the book Open Tourisum that was published by him, Roman Egger and Dominik Walcher. Igor Gula ranked third in the European Commission Crowdfunding Workshop.
VR-Summit Salzburg
Salzburg University of Applied Sciences hosts the first VR Summit Salzburg 2016 which takes place on 5th of October. The event starts at 2 pm and offers besides different speeches and panels also various exhibitions. The summit is characterized by its’ interdisciplinary program – the main topics being VR and entertainment, VR and health care and of course, VR and tourism. Our VR research group will also be present and give an overview about the different projects we are working on. Step by and check it out.
Register now! We will be there – and we are looking forward to see you there as well!
VR entering the tourism domain?
Here is an interview with Roman Egger from the Salzburger Nachrichten (27th of August 2016) – German Language
NEW: Virtual Reality Research Group
After initially kicking off the VR research project with just one bachelor and one master thesis, we have now expanded our team and formed a proper VR Research Division. Philipp has finished his bachelor thesis and will continue to contribute to the team and administrate the website. Julia is writing her master thesis about the perceived emotions of consumers when experiencing VR and the physiological effects. Alina will write her master thesis about what the perfect VR production looks like and will work on establishing a standard for the industry. Two groups from the master program have joined as part of the eTourism class. They are researching 1. the importance of presence and immersion, and 2. the possibilities of VR for destinations. Furthermore, Tobias, a master student from the MMT program (Multi-Media Technology), is also part of our VR Research Division. He will research 3D models and visualizations and help us with the production of our own content and hardware maintenance. The entire division is led by Prof. Dr. Roman Egger.
