Cultural heritage gamification and its effects on the tourist satisfaction

• Autor(a) principal: Cavalheiro, Nuno Miguel de Jesus Grilo
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/20308
• topic: Tourism; Gamification; Satisfaction; Cultural heritage; Sintra; Turismo; Gamificação; Satisfação; Património cultural

Tourism is nowadays one of the world’s main social and economic activities, who’s origin dates to more than two millennia ago. Gamification, on the other hand, is a recent topic only initially referenced in 2008, and which became a subject of wide study in the present decade and has been applied to several sectors due to its capacity of improving experience, shaping user behaviour, motivating desired behaviours, increasing brand awareness among other advantages. Tourism has been no exception in the implementation of gamification, although appliance and research are still scarce on this subject compared to others. Existing technology provides tourists with an easy access to pricing information, therefor no longer can businesses in this sector effectively differentiate themselves through price, but rather being forced to adopt a differentiated service offer. Existing research concludes that gamification can be used to enhance tourist experiences and improve loyalty. This paper aims to contribute to this growing subject by testing the effect of using gamification in the context of visits to historical sites. We conducted a qualitative survey which first analysed the requirements that tourists have on the context of a visit to historical sites and based on that information designed a mobile application with game elements which aims to aid their visit and improve their satisfaction. The analysis of the developed prototype suggests that gamification does represent a well-designed way to present sites, shape user behaviour, aid visit and increase satisfaction through the creation of an interactive and informational environment.