ABSTRACT
“Well begun is half done”
~Aristotle~
Gamification has been a fast growing phenomenon that will reshape the business world. Travel intentions and planning are synonymously coupled to destination awareness, the potential travelers’ image of a destination and their personal preferences and innovation. For the success of a destination’s marketing strategy, monitoring the intentions to travel is important to sustain high visitor arrivals and to manage their tourism offering.
Given the research interest and emerging trend of applications with game features, the literature on gamification for the travel industry integrating other technologies like Virtual Reality lacks theory to understand the behavioral intention of players to book a travel service while in a game or after playing a game.
We present a research literature review with the goal of identifying the main factors that would support the aforementioned theory. This study adopted the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework integrated with player type and novelty in a gamified virtual reality context.
Using a quantitative method, the findings of 300 participants revealed that Novelty and Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) highly relies on the user’s player type. Support is given for Novelty as a factor influencing users Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Enjoyment (PE) as predictors of intention to book a travel service.
Moreover, this study implies that research on gamification for travel games/apps are still in an embryonic stage, hence, it is the opportune time to develop a prototype that can manipulate, manage and commercialize the tourism and travel sector using technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR).

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