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This study aims to explore the antecedents that generate value co-destruction, the negative outcomes resulting from interactive value formation, in the sharing economy context, particularly taxi services. The focus of the study is on customers’ Uber reviews that are written in English and posted online. Three keywords, “bad”, “terrible” and “awful”, were used to capture online narratives linked to customers’ negative experiences with Uber. Out of the 758 online reviews, 75 negative reviews were analysed in this study.

A grounded theory approach was used for data analysis.

Two distinct themes resulted in value co-destruction: Uber drivers’ bad behaviour and poor customer service. The managerial implications include that Uber clearly should invest more resources to minimise the negative experiences of its customers by clearly defining the taxi drivers’ tasks and responsibilities. In addition, when customers report their dissatisfaction, they should be dealt with promptly and effectively through good customer service.

First, the netnography study, by its nature, was restricted to those customers who shared their reviews online. The study did not consider those customers who have not posted their reviews online. Second, the focus of the study was on customer reviews that were written in English. Third, only three keywords (“bad”, “terrible” and “awful”) were used in the data selection process, limiting the number of review posts (75) that were analysed in this study. In addition, even if this study does not produce statistically generalizable findings, the findings are valuable in an analytical sense.

From a managerial perspective, Uber clearly should invest more in resources to minimise the negative experiences of its customers (both domestic customers and tourists) by clearly defining the taxi drivers’ tasks and responsibilities. If the drivers’ tasks are unclear, then customers cannot be served in an effective manner and with consistent service quality. The taxi drivers, regardless of their full-time or part-time work shifts, should ensure that quality services are offered to customers. Providing high-quality service might reduce the number of complaints and result in positive comments and compliments.

This study addresses the gap in previous literature by examining customers’ negative experiences during the overall service encounter and antecedents of value co-destruction in the context of Uber. This study contributes to a better understanding of value co-destruction within the sharing economy.

This study aims to explore co-learning classes, a novel approach to leveraging universities’ capacity to contribute to the local sustainable development agenda whilst enhancing students’ learning. These participatory classes were piloted within a UK university masters’ module focussed on action for sustainability. The classes sought to combine knowledge exchange, reflection and social network development by bringing together students and community stakeholders.

The classes were run as a series of five free events, each focussed on sustainability issues relevant for local practitioners. These were either regular timetabled sessions opened up to the public or additional on-campus public events. Attendance was either face-to-face or online. Evaluation was based upon participation data, written feedback and module leader’s post-event reflections.

The classes successfully secured participation from diverse community members, including local government staff, voluntary sector workers and interested individuals. Both students and community stakeholders valued the participatory format, linkages of theoretical and practical knowledge and diversity of attendees.

Findings are based upon a small-scale pilot study. Further research using a wider range of contexts is required to enhance understanding of the co-learning approach.

This paper highlights some key practical issues to consider if employing co-learning approaches in other contexts, including using inclusive language, aligning with students’ motivations and choosing appropriate focal event topics.

Opening up participatory university classes for the public to attend as co-learners is a rarely used approach and has little coverage in academic literature. This small-scale study therefore has value by highlighting some of the potential impacts, strengths and limitations of this approach.

This paper aims to explore the meaning of smart office environments from a user perspective by investigating user preferences and expectations.

Eleven semi-structured interviews with the users after moving into a smart office building of a Dutch Municipality and an observation as complementary data were conducted. The data were analysed based on the grounded theory and thematic analysis, combining a reflexive approach to the literature review.

Two main themes were revealed addressing user expectations and preferences for smart office environments: “enhanced interaction” with the social and physical office environment and “sense-making” of the smart concept (or smartness). Within these themes, basic and smart office aspects were identified and classified based on their association with smart office concepts or technology.

The findings reveal the meaning of the smart office concepts from a user perspective by highlighting the importance of user experience on enhanced interaction and sense-making of the smart office concept, equipped with basic and smart aspects.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to qualitatively examine drivers underlying the meaning of smart office concepts from a user point of view. Organisations, environmental psychologists, designers and managers can use the findings of this study to develop guidelines for a successful smart office design.

Smart learning analytics (Smart LA) – i.e. the process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data on how students learn – has great potentials to support opportunistic learning and offer better – and more personalized – learning experiences. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the latest developments and features of Smart LA by reviewing relevant cases.

The paper studies several representative cases of Smart LA implementation, and highlights the key features of Smart LA. In addition, it discusses how instructors can use Smart LA to better understand the efforts their students make, and to improve learning experiences.

Ongoing research in Smart LA involves testing across various learning domains, learning sensors and LA platforms. Through the collection, analysis and visualization of learner data and performance, instructors and learners gain more accurate understandings of individual learning behavior and ways to effectively address learner needs. As a result, students can make better decisions when refining their study plans (either by themselves or in collaboration with others), and instructors obtain a convenient monitor of student progress. In summary, Smart LA promotes self-regulated and/or co-regulated learning by discovering opportunities for remediation, and by prescribing materials and pedagogy for remedial instruction.

Characteristically, Smart LA helps instructors give students effective and efficient learning experiences, by integrating the advanced learning analytics technology, fine-grained domain knowledge and locale-based information. This paper discusses notable cases illustrating the potential of Smart LA.

The purpose of this trends paper is to offer insights into the technological changes affecting our cities and urban tourism destinations, and to explore avenues for further research and practice in the context of smart tourism destinations.

The literature on smart cities and smart tourism destinations is analysed in view of delivering a research agenda for a new generation of “post-smart” tourism destinations, beyond existing paradigms in this field.

Smart tourism research to date is found to be lacking in terms of addressing emerging (“post-smart”) social issues increasingly faced by global tourism cities, such as growing inequalities between host communities and visitors, wellness (e.g. slow tourism and slow cities) and resilience and mental health (e.g. digital detox), among others.

A post-smart approach to tourism city management and marketing calls for rethinking of existing tourism and urban policies that address wider sustainability issues exemplified by the urban transitions debate as well as adopting a more holistic networked approach to smartness involving entire regions. This also calls for the development of a new research agenda in urban tourism through a new prism – the post-smart “wise” tourism destination.

A new tourism futures construct – the “wise” tourism destination – is posited. This is done within the context of a new (“post-smart”) generation of tourism cities. It is argued that “wise” tourism cities will require novel attributes and adopt a visionary strategic positioning well beyond today’s smart tourism destination paradigms. Additionally, a tentative research agenda for “wise” tourism cities is discussed.

Digitalization accelerates the need of tourism and hospitality ecosystems to reframe business models in line with a data-driven orientation that can foster value creation and innovation. Since the question of data-driven business models (DDBMs) in hospitality remains underexplored, this paper aims at (1) revealing the key dimensions of the data-driven redefinition of business models in smart hospitality ecosystems and (2) conceptualizing the key drivers underlying the emergence of innovation in these ecosystems.

The empirical research is based on semi-structured interviews collected from a sample of hospitality managers, employed in three different accommodation services, i.e. hotels, bed and breakfast (B&Bs) and guesthouses, to explore data-driven strategies and practices employed on site.

The findings allow to devise a conceptual framework that classifies the enabling dimensions of DDBMs in smart hospitality ecosystems. Here, the centrality of strategy conducive to the development of data-driven innovation is stressed.

The study thus developed a conceptual framework that will serve as a tool to examine the impact of digitalization in other service industries. This study will also be useful for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) managers, who seek to understand the possibilities data-driven management strategies offer in view of stimulating innovation in the managers' companies.

The paper reinterprets value creation practices in business models through the lens of data-driven approaches. In this way, this paper offers a new (conceptual and empirical) perspective to investigate how the hospitality sector at large can use the massive amounts of data available to foster innovation in the sector.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the increasing importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in smart tourism destinations, in their integration in the activity of the tourism companies, and in their interaction with visitors/tourists. In summary, it is intended to evaluate in the city of Porto how the use of technology before, during and after the visit influences the tourist experience.

The authors empirically investigate the importance of using ICTs during tourism experience, assess the access/availability of ICT at the destination and its importance in tourist’s decisions. It is analyzed if the applications and/or information available on the internet are important and positively influence the tourism experience in Porto, that is, the degree of tourist satisfaction. The empirical evidence is based on a quantitative analysis, using a data set involving 423 tourists in the city of Porto.

The importance of the internet access at the destination, especially in places like airports and hotels, since most tourists are primarily using their mobile devices and computers during the trip, and the existing information technologies available in the destination (internet, smartphones or other mobile devices and applications) are considered very important in explaining tourists’ experience.

This study identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the technological strategies, providing useful information for destination management, discussing innovation in tourism, and proposing a framework that empirically evaluates how technological components used in smart tourism destinations can improve tourists’ experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework based on an understanding of the principles of popular mobile-enabled games, indicating how organisations in the tourism sector could meet the needs of Millennials and Generation Z through engaging with the existing gamified location-based practice of geocaching as an information and communication technology enabled gamified enhancement to the destination experience.

As a primarily conceptual paper, the authors take an inductive qualitative approach to theory building based on the understanding of an existing practice (geocaching) that is undertaken among a community of practitioners (geocachers), which results in the presentation of a conceptual framework, which is the theory itself that the authors have constructed from the understanding of what is going on and which principles can then be applied across other tourism practices.

Findings indicate that through engaging with geocaching, smaller entrepreneurial businesses even in non-urban destinations that fall outside of the remit of smart city developments, and in tourism destinations on the less technologically enabled or resource-rich side of the digital divide, can reap the benefits associated with employing the principles and practices associated with smart tourism to meet the needs of this new generation of tourism consumers who seek richer digital and often gamified tourism experiences.

This paper fills a gap in the literature regarding the way many different types of tourism destinations could meet the needs of Millennials and Generation Z tourists.

The Reflective Middleware for Acoustic Management (ReM-AM), based on the Middleware for Cloud Learning Environments (AmICL), aims to improve the interaction between users and agents in a Smart Environment (SE) using acoustic services, in order to consider the unpredictable situations due to the sounds and vibrations. The middleware allows observing, analyzing, modifying and interacting in every state of a SE from the acoustics. This work details an extension of the ReM-AM using the ontology-driven architecture (ODA) paradigm for acoustic management.

This work details an extension of the ReM-AM using the ontology-driven architecture (ODA) paradigm for acoustic management. In this paper are defined the different domains of knowledge required for the management of the sounds in SEs, which are modeled using ontologies.

This work proposes an acoustics and sound ontology, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) ontology, and a data analytics and autonomic computing ontology, which work together. Finally, the paper presents three case studies in the context of smart workplace (SWP), ambient-assisted living (AAL) and Smart Cities (SC).

Future works will be based on the development of algorithms for classification and analysis of sound events, to help with emotion recognition not only from speech but also from random and separate sound events. Also, other works will be about the definition of the implementation requirements, and the definition of the real context modeling requirements to develop a real prototype.

In the case studies is possible to observe the flexibility that the ReM-AM middleware based on the ODA paradigm has by being aware of different contexts and acquire information of each, using this information to adapt itself to the environment and improve it using the autonomic cycles. To achieve this, the middleware integrates the classes and relations in its ontologies naturally in the autonomic cycles.

The main contribution of this work is the description of the ontologies required for future works about acoustic management in SE, considering that what has been studied by other works is the utilization of ontologies for sound event recognition but not have been expanded like knowledge source in an SE middleware. Specifically, this paper presents the theoretical framework of this work composed of the AmICL middleware, ReM-AM middleware and the ODA paradigm.

Sex tourism is well documented in the literature, but what about porn tourism? Whether it is a Ping Pong show in Phuket or the Banana show in Amsterdam, porn and tourism have an encounter and gaze no different from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or magnificent views of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper explores the intersections of tourism, porn and the future as a conceptual framework.

Four intersections are derived from the conceptual framework. Intersection 1, the Future of Tourism, portrays the evolution of tourism and explores its technological future. Interaction 2, Porn in Tourism, distinguishes between soft- and hard-core porn tourism. Intersection 3, Portraying Porn as a Future Dimension, delves into futurism, science fiction and fantasy. The fourth intersection, the Future Gaze, conveys the thrust of the paper by exploring how technological advancement blends with authenticity and reality. Thus the porn tourist seeks both the visual and the visceral pleasures of desire. The paper concludes with four future gazes of porn tourism, The Allure of Porn, The Porn Bubble, Porn as Liminal Experience and Hardcore.

The originality of this paper is that this is the first paper to systematically examine porn tourism beyond sex tourism overlaying with a futures dimension. Porn tourists actively seek to experience both visual and visceral pleasures. Tourism and pornography both begin with the gaze. The gaze is an integral component of futures thinking. Technology is changing us, making us smarter, driving our thirst for liminal experiences. Like the transition from silent movies to talking pictures the porn tourism experience of the future is likely to involve more of the bodily senses.