A new possible way of promoting tourist packages: gamification

Society nowadays is increasingly reliant on technology and the trend for the following years seems to maintain. At the same time, public and private organizations are searching for ways to innovate and optimize their activities and the internet as well as the increased use of electronic devices provide new perspectives for this. Besides the public sector, high ranking companies from domains such as commerce to health or tourism, have started using a new tool: gamification. While some of the first attempts to implement the idea of ‘games’ for selling products go as far back as 1912, the scientific concept of ‘gamification’ is quite new and has just recently been recognized as a study domain. In addition to this, a rising interest in the field is also proven by an increase in number of searches for the term on search engines as well as in scientific databases. From an organizational point of view, through the use of these techniques, institutions can obtain a positive influence on sales, enhanced customer retention, better marketing, improved employee-management communication, overall optimization of activity etc. This paper aims to offer a contribution to the research in the field of gamification, to show some of the revolutionary solutions found by top organizations, based on gaming techniques, and to propose a model for implementing gamification in a tourism organization. The research starts from studying the gamification model implemented by leading tourism platform, Tripadvisor and focuses on building a game-specific architecture that can be applied to Romanian tourism sites, ranging from tourist review sites, such as turistinfo.ro to online tourism agencies. This model includes elements specific to games, and characteristic for the gamification concept, such as: avatar, rewards, challenges, points, badges, leaderboard. The study finishes with opinions regarding the economic and social benefits of implementing gamification as an innovative technique in tourism and conclusions.