How Smartphone apps can provide value to the Cultural Tourist

Cultural tourism constitutes an interesting business opportunity for many companies. Recent advances in mobile-based technologies open new ways in offering value to cultural tourists, driving some tech companies to enter the cultural tourism market at full steam. These companies offer the opportunity to exploit benefits new technologies, providing users with a set of services that are more responsive to their new expectations and information needs, supporting them along all the tourism experience lifecycle. Although there are countless mobile apps aimed to assist tourists with their everyday practices, little research has been devoted to investigate the impact of these technologies on the management cultural tourism services. This research constitutes a first attempt to fill this gap. We reviewed a set of 80 mobile apps providing services for cultural tourists, in order to design a bi-dimensional framework to position the offering of app based cultural tourism services.