Augmenting tourist experience with mobile wallet and NFC technology

The main new challenge of the ‘smart era’ can be synthesized by the sentence ‘complexity of simplicity’. It means providing complex products or services that can be perceived as simple, useful and time-saving by users. Aiming to simply complexity for the life of citizens, the scientific community is dealing with the development of new models of ‘Smart City’, based on ICT, sustainable growth, social inclusion and the quality of life in urban areas. The consumers of tourist services are swamped with information coming from different sources and they need to make a great effort and spend a lot of time and energies, to take decisions and act. By considering the tourist experience as a complex system we depict the traveler as a kybernetes in search of powerful tools to help him to get directions in the ‘mare magnum’ of complexity, overcoming the fear of action and taking decisions (Dominici, 2011, 2013). Smart phones and mobile devices can have a key role in mediating the touristic experience (Wang et al., 2012). They are becoming the most promising area in order to promote technological innovation in the tourism sector (Palumbo, Dominici & Basile, 2013). The mobile wallet, or multi-wallet, integrates physical wallet, money, payment cards, keys and other cards, enabling users to simultaneously run all these cards using their smart phones thanks to the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. The aims of the paper are thus: - to contribute to fill the literature gap in the fields of NFC and mobile wallet impacts on tourism; - to evaluate the attitude of tourists towards the adoption of mobile NFC technology and mobile wallet during their travel experience; - to suggest how to increase tourist satisfaction integrating NFC technology and mobile wallet in a broad range of tourist services.