The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the effect of gamification on tourist psychological outcome and knowledge gain in the context of cultural heritage sites, which are popular cruise tourism destinations. A comprehensive literature review revealed the critical role of gamification in facilitating psychological (enjoyment, flow experience, and loyalty) and behavioral outcomes (knowledge gain) at cultural heritage sites. Using a field experiment, this study employed a gamified app as a manipulation. A total of 342 gamified app users (n = 165) or non-users (n = 177) were selected by stratified random sampling method from among college students majoring in tourism and cruise management in South Korea. After screening the data, a Hayes’ PROCESS modeling technique was mainly utilized to test the proposed hypotheses based on 331 cases. The results showed that gamification had a strong influence on knowledge gain about cultural heritage attractions. On the other hand, gamification had negative effects on enjoyment and flow experience. More importantly, gamification had a negative indirect effect on loyalty toward cultural heritage attractions. These findings imply the usefulness of gamified apps to convey memorable and real-time information and knowledge to users in cultural heritage sites.

The purpose of the present study is to examine the impact of social capital on destination marketing organisations' (DMOs) technology adoption, especially Web 2.0. In other words, among the variety of factors that might influence individuals' or organisations' technology adoption, this study suggests that the concept of social capital is an additional important factor that might influence DMOs' technology adoption. Social networks (size of network, tie strength, and bridging and bonding ties), trust, norms, and associational activity were chosen as the components of social capital. The results revealed that, with the exception of trust and tie strength, most components of social capital exerted significant effects on DMOs' levels of technology adoption.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the competitive relationships among the four major Global Distribution Systems (GDSs), which are representative reservation systems in the tourism industry by using niche theory. To that end, niche theory, which presents the three core concepts of niche breadth, niche overlap, and niche superiority, was combined with gratification in the uses to apply the gratification niche analysis technique. Based on an extensive literature review, four factors (core functions, system functions, service functions, and additional functions) to measure user satisfaction levels by function with GDSs were extracted. Online/offline questionnaire surveys were conducted with travel agencies’ airline counter staffs who had experience using all four GDSs, and in total, 324 copies of the questionnaire were used in the analysis. The analysis results confirmed that Sabre had a competitive edge in general over the other three GDSs, while TOPAS (Amadeus) and Galileo had a comparative competitive edge in certain functions. This study suggested concrete implications that can help individual GDSs in terms of their development of functions or the establishment of marketing strategies by verifying user satisfaction by the function of individual GDSs.