Omnipresent Social Media: Is Travelling Imaginable without Smart Devices?

As earlier people went on holidays for the relaxation and the feeling of escape from the ordinary weekdays, nowadays most of them cannot imagine to spend a few days without internet connection or their smartphones during travels. The benefits of using smart phones and social media cannot be questioned, however, the drawbacks have to be also considered. To reveal the cons and pros of the phenomenon, first a brief theoretical overview of the topic is introduced, and then the analysis of the results of the empirical research involving 386 people in Hungary are put into the focus of this paper. The online survey conducted in Autumn 2019 gave the opportunity to study the mobile phone and social media usage habits of the Hungarians during their holidays. Simple descriptive statistics and the method of multidimensional scaling (MDS) with ALSCAL procedure were applied to illustrate the perceptions and attitudes of the respondents, and to interpret the hidden relationships among the variables. The results show that the smart tools and social media are organic parts of the holidays: 90 n of the respondents use social media platform like Facebook daily, and 48 n said that they use their mobile phones less during holidays compared to the everyday. However, only 13.5% of them would be willing to mitigate the usage of smart devices totally, while in case of social media usage this proportion is higher, 37.9%.