Validation of a Gamified Mobile Experience by DMOs

Gamified mobile experiences offer several potential benefits to Destination Management Organizations (DMOs), such as encouraging engagement, enhancing experiences, improving loyalty, or increasing brand awareness of tourists. Moreover, they also offer a new source of interesting information about tourists. However, examples of DMOs applying gamification for the on-site phase of the trip, validation of its impact and exploitation of information gathered from gamified mobile experiences are still lacking. This paper focuses on these issues, presenting a gamified mobile experience generated by three DMOs and validated by real tourists in two villages of the Basque Country during seven weeks. Data obtained both from tourists and from an analytics tool integrated with the mobile experience have been analysed, highlighting the benefits of gamified experiences and the relevance of analytics tools for DMOs.

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