Using smartphones reservations for hotels in Barcelona for a business segment : Empirical analysis

This paper tries to demonstrate that virtual communities or social media influence the decision to buy tourism products. Specifically, we show that smartphone bookings made by business tourists coming to Barcelona are increasingly popular. The methodology used is first a comprehensive literature review on the topic, media and social networks as a means of tourism promotion and product recommendation. Then, the article goes on with quantitative method that converts the object of study into numerical data, with emphasis on the measurable objective and, therefore, requiring the use of statistics For this study we decided to devise a quantitative questionnaire which is usually the method of data collection by most usual research using this type of method. The multiple choice is an instrument for obtaining data and it is used to gather the information needed: facts, opinions, trends. Data collection was carried out for 4 months (May, June, July and August 2015) with n=1512. We conducted a sieve with inclusion and exclusion criteria and which discarded all participants who did not travel for business. The final sample was 494 participants. We conclude that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare social media are the media used by young people and where gender does not influence their use. However, the degree of use of Google+, Linkedin, TripAdvisor and Booking have no significant relationship, taking into account such variables as age and gender.


Introduction
This investigation intends to prove that Virtual Communities or Social Media influence on the decision to purchase tourist products in a full-fledged Broadband Society [5].Especifically we have decided to prove that bookings made by using smartphones by business tourists in Barcelona are increasingly more usual.
The Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) are having a big impact on our society.The new generations assimilate naturally the new culture in this technological era.Nowadays, by using the new technological advances human beings have achieved things which were impossible to carry out previously.Hardware and software have been implemented in areas such as education, health, security, government or companies with the aim of managing information [4].
According to the report "The Information Society in Spain" [8], more than half of Spaniards (76.2%) between 16 and 74 years old use the Internet daily.There are 26.2 million of Internet users (Internet users over the last three months), 1.45% more than in 2013.Frequent users (who connect at least once a week) account for 93.5% of total Internet users.The report also says that the device used to access the Internet when travelling is the smartphone (63.2%) with Internet access using its own smartphone network; followed by laptops (including netbooks and tablets) with 31.6% and other devices (PDAs, game consoles, etc.) with 6.3%.The study of the "Orange Foundation" says that Spain is the fourth European country in number of smartphones.
Smartphones often help the tourists in their travel [10,20] and have a significant impact on the activity of the trip [19].According to Wang et al. [19] today travelers are in constant search for information in order to reduce uncertainty and make use of their smartphones as assistants throughout all phases.Especially before and during the trip, they rely on mobile technology to simplify the trip looking for information on transportation, lodging, attractions and activities.Travelers also use smartphones in order to communicate with others, using like emails, phone calls, text messages and social networks [3].On the other hand, smartphones also represent a tool for self-entertainment games, music, and photography, photo sharing, watching movies or reading news.
As regards the supply side, there are various categorizations in the scope of mTourism [9,20,21] for the proposal to deploy the complexity and diversity of this topic.Kennedy and Gretzel-Eden [9], have created two classifications, the first seven categories, depending on the application services related to travel.They are "Navigation", "Social", "Mobile Marketing", "Security/Emergency", "Transactional", "Information" and "Entertainment", which are divided into several sub-categories.The second is based on the level of customization and is classified into seven major areas, ranging from personal preferences -which indicate the highest level-to "Sensitive Location", "Security/Data Control", "Control by means of the Internet","Addiction to content", "Cosmetic changes" and, ultimately, the applications that can not be customized in any way and do not offer any type of interaction.
Besides studying conventional guidebooks for mobiles [16,11], there are investigation on basic location aware context [22,1,13], augmented reality [18], the requests as well as mobile applications in the context of the business of various tourist service providers such as airlines [14], theme parks [2], and hotels [12].

Methodology
The methodology used was first a comprehensive literature review on the topic, i.e., Media and Social Networks as a way of tourist promotion and product recommendation.This research was based on a quantitative method that converts the object of study into numerical data, with emphasis on the objective measurement and, therefore, requiring the use of statistics [6].For this study we decided to produce a quantitative questionnaire which is the usual method for data collection in the research and it using this type of method.The questionnaire is an instrument for obtaining data used to gather the information needed: facts, opinions and trends.
According to Merino Sanz et al. [15], the questionnaire homogenises the information since all the subjects respond to the survey questions that are formulated in a standardized way, allowing information processing faster.We used the questionnaire that was designed to know the use of Social Media from a universe with Business as the main motivation for the trip.
First of all, there are a number of questions such the age, the sex, the origin and the level of education, on the one hand in order to see the profile of participants, and on the other hand to check how representative sample is. he various sets of questions want to know the reasons that motivate participants when participating in Social Media, the degree of confidence that they have, how the individual tourists organize their trip (before, during and after) and role of Social Media in these issues.
For the assessment of the majority of questions we used the Likert Scale, which measures attitudes toward a proposal depending on the respondent's degree of agreement or disagreement.
In quantitative research processes we usually select a representative sample of the population that is under study, so the results can be generalized to study the universe investigated [6].
Samples have some obvious advantages with respect to the study population, since with a restricted sample large populations can be surveyed and human, which otherwise would be very difficult.

Results
Data was collected over a 4 mounts period (May-August 2015) and 1,512 valid results were obtained.A streming process was performed, using inclusive and exclusive criteria, and all those participants who were not on a business trip were discarded.The final sample included 494 partipants (Table 1 & 2).In this study we saw that the most used device by business tourism is smartphone, next is the Laptop and the tablet in third position (Table 3).Social Media more used are Booking and TripAdvisor (Table 5), the only ítems over the average (2.5).6 shows that the main motivation for using Social Media is the immediate communication with contacts, family and/or friends of the participants.The degree of trust and privacy opinion on Social Media below 3 (<3) is associated with the item "Information and comments offered by social networking companies inspire confidence."The reliability and confidence increase when information is offered to companies that choose to follow the participants (Table 7).When organizing a trip, the participants seem to prefer to seek information and engage primarily in the pages of suppliers, fully exceeding the average (3) (Table 8).The data in Table 11 show that the most used means for contacting the accommodation is the Phone and Email, which far exceed the average (3) and the website, which also has a higher value than the average.In the case of the Apps (Table 12) we see that those perceived as more useful are those of Hotels, exceeding the average (2.5).

Conclusions and Discussion
The advantages of social media are beyond simple positioning.In fact, they have to do with increased competitiveness and the chance to build a development strategy and continuous improvement to have the continous opportunity to build a development strategy and improvement.
Considering Gretzel and Yoo [7], three quarters of travelers attend comments from other online consumers as a reference to plan their trips.Therefore, and given our results, social media are a reference when traveling or consuming "tourism" by other Internet users.The consumer's opinion websites (Khammash and Burton, 2010) allow travelers to review any aspects of a vacation, including lodging, restaurants, destinations and other tourism-related products, such as tour operators.As soon as you publish comments on the networks, they are available to other potential travelers to read and make use to make decisions later [17].
According to Henning-Thurau et al. ( 2004), eWOM communication articulated by opinion platforms based on the opinions of consumers have greater impact than other opinions published in other Media, because, unlike other groups, opinion platforms are relatively easy to use and require less knowledge surfer from consumers who want to get information.
The results of our investigation show that most travelers believe, as Kotler et al. say (2010), the information provided by the social media users is less biased, credible and reliable information when compared with traditional organizations.

Table 3 :
When I connect to Internet, I do with ... (indicate % of time)

Table 4
shows the least know Social Media are Instagram and Foursquare, which are below the average(2.5)

Table 5 .
Level of use of Social Media (0=no use, 1=few use; 5=much use)

Table 6 .
Motivations that lead to use Social Media (1= strongly disagree, 5=totally agree)

Table 7 .
Opinion on the Trust and Privacy of Social Media (1=strongly disagree, 5=totally agree)

Table 9
shows that participants interact with Media / Social Network especially while traveling.

Table 9 .
Value if you perform the following actions regarding the use of Media/Social networks before, during and after the trip (1=strongly disagree, 5=totally agree)

Table 10
(3)ws that most used media/social networks are Facebook and Booking exceeding the average value(3)

Table 10 .
Indicate the degree in which you have used Media/Social Network on this trip (1=rarely or never, 5=ever)

Table 11 .
When you want to contact the accommodation, which means do you use more often?

Table 12 .
Evaluate the degree of usefulness of mobile apps (0=don't use, 1=nothing usefull and 5=very helpful)