The dissertation’s title is "Smartphoned Tourists in the Phygital Tourist Experience".

The thesis explores how the tourist experience is re-articulated through the mediation of smartphones. The new tourist that emerges from smartphone mediation is the smartphoned tourist, that is a tourist whose experience is shaped by the availability and use of this technology.

The thesis focuses on two aspects: first, how smartphones mediate tourist information behaviour. The concept of planned serendipity is proposed to indicate how smartphone-mediated information behaviour is complex and cannot be reduced to a dichotomy of serendipity and planning.

Second, the thesis explores how smartphones mediate tourists’ experiences of phygital worlds. The term phygital is adopted to indicate how the technologically mediated tourist experience is neither physical nor digital, but both.

The dissertation defence will take place on October 14th in room U203 at Campus Helsingborg.

The faculty opponent is professor Maria Lexhagen from Mid Sweden University.

More information about the dissertation can be found here.