This document presents a proposal for designing a mobile application to enhance personal travel experiences by utilizing information from social media. The goals are to 1) design and deploy a user-friendly application and 2) collect user data to demonstrate that the application positively impacts travel experiences. Key objectives include connecting the application to social media to extract travel information and enable personalization. The document outlines the background on how mass media influences travel decisions. It proposes hypotheses that the new application functions will enhance travel experiences by providing personalized recommendations and trip planning assistance based on social media data.

1. (Draft - Not Latexed)
University of New York
Design an application to enhance people’s personal travelling experiences by utilising information
from social media.
Prof. Kathleen McDermott & Prof. Benedetta Piantella
A report submitted in fulfilment of the Pre-thesis course requirements for Integrated Digital Media
in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society.
Abstract:
This paper presents the process of ideation and prototyping on the topic of exploring the
connection between personal traveling experiences and mass media. Mass media is the
information and advice we fed daily from various sources that could often be ignored by us, but
influenced us all greatly at the same time. It includes internet media such as podcasts, blogs,
message boards and videos, and it is not limited to the media producers. Furthermore, the mass
media plays a curial role in putting emerging travel information together in current social media
blast. The vast majority of travel is decided upon by people who have never before travelled to
that particular destination, and are therefore dependant on media reporting. It can not be ignored
that the recent boom in tourism can be attributed to the media information. According to the
statistics from agency, travellers are increasingly interested in having a personalised travel
experience that is tailored to their particular preferences. The problem of increasing people‘s
personal traveling experience via masa media opens (affects) one more possibility of making
travel tips and enhance traveling experience, the impact of which is people value the new way of
travel planning and it highly injects the personal elements into it. Therefore, it is significant to
bridge the connection of mass media and travel plans in order to enhance the personal traveling
experience for each person.
(shorten the abstract)
Keywords: Social Media, Travel Experience, Mobile Application, Personalised Travel,
Recommendation System, Trip Planning, Location based service
Introduction
• Background
According to statistics, there are aspects which affect our way of thinking much more than mass
media alone. The information and advice we are fed daily from various sources can often be
ignored by us, but the mass media influences us all greatly, therefore, it is important for us to
define mass media. The term “mass media” was first used in the 1920s to denote a section of the
media aimed at targeting the lager audience using outlets such as nationwide radio networks and
mass circulation of newspapers and magazines, though some forms of mass media such as
books and manuscripts had already been used successfully for centuries. (One varying topic)
Mass media includes Internet media such as podcasts, blogs, message boards and video. We
now have the kind of exposure that is compares in scale to that which was once restricted only to
a certain band of mass media producers. Such audience communication has been considered by
various commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, in particular,
atomisation or the lack of social connections this makes it especially open to the influence of
modern mass media techniques such as advertising and propaganda. Public media as a term is
used much less and is defined as “media whose mission is to server or engage a public”.
social media subset. specific tools for mass / social (for example)
The media play a crucial role in putting emerging travel information together in current social
media blast. The vast majority of travel is decided upon by people who have never before
travelled to that particular destination, and are therefore dependant on media reporting or other
people’s recommendations. It can not be ignored that the recent boom in tourism can be
attributed to the media.Through the Internet, information and various articles on a destination can
be found which will give the traveller an advantage.

2. • Aims and Key Objectives
Mass media are playing an increasingly important role as information sources for travellers. And it
is increasingly relevant as part of tourism practices affecting destinations and businesses. Mass
media is not a single but an integrated object. Social media plays a significant role in many
aspects of tourism, especially in information search and decision-making behaviours, tourism
promotion and in focusing on best practices for interacting with consumers. However, the issues
is all the information that could be extracted online can not be formed to serve various travel
purposes. And businessmen and young people takes the majority part of the travellers. They
either have lots of spare time or money. Thus, one huge problem here to solve is to help travellers
to save time and make the trip just like shopping with several clicks to finish. On the other hand,
travellers are increasingly interested in having a personalised travel experience that is tailored to
their particular preferences. Some travel reservation systems attempt to provide personalised
services to customers either by compiling customer information into a Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) system or manually by agency. Therefore, this thesis project is to design and
deploy an application that could enhance people’s personal travelling experiences by utilising
information from mass media.
According to statistics from travel agency, and with the expand of the information from mass
media, travellers are increasingly interested in having a personalised travel experience that is
tailored to their particular preferences. The problem of increasing people‘s personal traveling
experience via masa media opens one more possibility of making travel tips and enhance
traveling experience, the impact of which is people value the new way of travel planning and it
highly injects the personal elements into it.
Thus, the thesis project goal is to design and deploy an application that could enhance people’s
personal travelling experiences by utilising information from mass media.
• Mass Media in Tourism (Tourism Sharing)
• Mass Media on the Internet (Online Travel Information Search)
• Mass Media in consumer-generated media creation (Personal Travel Experiences)
• Previous Relevant Applications/Systems
1. Comparison with TripAdvisor
2. Comparison with LuckyTrip
Requirement and Analysis
This section details the procedures adopted in the experiments. It outlines the experimental
aspects of the procedures, highlights potential problems. The first section in this chapter
reiterates the project objectives, identifies the variables and measurements applied in this study
and presents the hypotheses to be tested. The second section in this chapter mainly focuses on
the user analysis.
• Aims, objectives and measurements
The project aim is to bridge the connection of mass media and travel plans in order to enhance
the personal traveling experience for each person, by designing and deploying the mobile
application. And the application is primarily achieved by establishing connection with mass media
and extracting information (through API) to realise personalisation.
To satisfy this aim, it is necessary and vital to identify the measurement for result analysis at the
later stage. The measurement is set as user acceptances. User acceptance is the variable that

3. measure the percentage of the users that are willing to use the application in their daily life. The
measurements are took both before and after using the application (detailed in experiment design
section). And with the comparison of before and after parts, it could be able to generate statistical
significance to prove the application is indeed useful to enhance people’s personal travelling
experiences.
To be more specific, the goal of this project is to design and deploy the application to enhance
people’ travelling experiences, but it is not enough to stop at this point. When finish deploying the
UI application, it is vital to prove it is useful and positive that it could help people to enhance
personal travelling experiences. What if the designed product is rejected by users or not having
any positive feedbacks or results. In such circumstances, the project goal is not satisfied, and
require iterations on the product design and developments. So, specifically speaking, the project
goal is not only to design and deploy the tool to help enhance people’s personal travelling
experiences, but also need to prove it is working positively. Otherwise, it is not a successful
project.
Overall, the key objectives of this project is composed if two parts:
1. Design and Deploy the UI application to enhance the personal traveling experience.
2. Collect the measurement data to prove the application is useful and positive to enhance the
personal traveling experience.
• Hypothesis (little bit ease on this part)
As the thesis project is to design and deploy the application to enhance users’ personal travelling
experiences, so expectedly the final product / application should be proven useful and result
positive. Thus, the measurements (result data) - user acceptances should be shown as increasing
to produce statistical significance. Thus, we could conclude that the designed travel application is
user accepted and could help people to enhance their personal travelling experience. Thus, only
the feasible hypothesis is considered. The following hypotheses are the feasible hypothesis and
the null hypothesis (alternative hypothesis).
Hypothesis 1 (Feasible Hypothesis): Such new-developed functions can enhance people’s
personal travelling experience via information extracted from mass media.
Hypothesis 2 (Null Hypothesis): Such new-developed functions can not enhance people’s
personal travelling experience via information extracted from mass media.
Hypothesis 3: Such new-developed functions do not have positive or negative impact on people’s
personal travelling experience via information extracted from mass media.
In order to prove the final product is positive and useful, the null hypothesis should be rejected
and feasible hypothesis should be accepted by doing results analysis. And the signal to prove
that is to produce statistical significance from results data.
• User Analysis
User Interview
Target User
Stakeholder list
User Personas
Experiment Design and Test
This section presents the details of three experiments and prototypes, in order to explore and
verify the feasibility of developing the personal travelling applications.
• Experiment 1 - Game
• Experiment 2 - Survey
• Experiment 3 - UI Comparison

4. Conclusion
Overall, this paper produces some foundational research and prototyping results for the future
thesis project on how to bridge the connection of mass media and travel plans in order to
enhance the personal traveling experience for each person. Both background research and user
interviews have pointed out two curial issues with current travel application on the market, which
is first, not personalised, second, not time-convenient. Along with some other small problems,
such as, not-so-well developed recommendation system. Expectedly, In order tackle such issues,
mass media plays a unique role in extracting and integrating scatted information on each
platform, shortening the time on searching and targeting on your preferences with your personal
choices and geo-tagged recommendations, eventually, with few clicks, the platform would
generate the map view of the entire itinerary and highly-flexible document version. With such
clear-set goal in the mind, several experiments and prototypes were conducted to explore and
verify the feasibility of developing such applications. Some valuable insights were offered by the
potential users: First, people value personal element a lot, but the willingness of using such app or
function is not determined or can be foresaw, second, pursuit convenience and cultivate user
behaviour is the majority thing to do. For the future steps, I would keep exploring the issues of
personal travelling and stating to make the foundation of the application algorithm and user
interfaces design over summer.
References:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11277-014-2082-7
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211973614000026
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517714000132
https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=h6CLAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA171&dq=media+and+personal+travelling+
experience&ots=TmTrK9fvci&sig=Fyf3itZiiEXQswqRnhY8i2gWyGY#v=onepage&q=media
%20and%20personal%20travelling%20experience&f=false
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261517709000387
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738308001114
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563210001226