Forecasting Mobile Technology Use in Japanese Tourism

Mobile access to the Internet gives tourism suppliers considerable innovative opportunities to develop tourism applications. This is particularly true in Japan, which has a high level of mobile technology. This article identifies some of those opportunities. It uses the Delphi method to survey experts of public and private sectors in various IT and tourism-related fields in Japan. The results present many types of future mobile applications likely to occur in Japanese tourism by the year 2015. The results demonstrate that all sectors of the travel industry will be impacted, although some more than others. Both commercial, transaction-based applications (facilitated by e-money and QR-code services) and location- and situation-based applications that enhance the visitor experience are likely to be common in destinations by 2015. A chronology of the expected dates for mobile tourism developments is also given.