Smart Travel Planning to the Algarve by Older Tourists before the Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis

Abstract

Information and communication technologies, or ICT, have revolutionized societies’ daily lives and the economy’s development on a global scale. Senior tourism is considered a sector in solid expansion, and, as such, it matters to understand the importance that these tourists attribute to these technologies. The association between tourism and digitalization gave rise to the concept of “smart tourism”. So, it is essential to have the necessary skills to be active in a world mediated by the internet. It is not just tourist destinations that have evolved in the present digital age; tourists, themselves, have also changed. However, this digitalization has not equitably reached the entire senior population. The main goal of this article is to analyze the internet use by older tourists to plan their trip to the Algarve before the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It has the specific objective of identifying and exploring what type of service they sought the information. The results indicate that there are statistically significant differences between different groups of respondents regarding the use of the internet to plan a trip to the Algarve.

Keywords

• smart tourism
• older tourism
• information and communication technologies
• smart travel planning