Introduction: My PhD aims to study group tourists’ trip planning process, find their unique characteristics and requirements, design novel interactions, and finally facilitate group tourists’ planning experience. Existing studies showed that planning a single traveller’s trip distinguished from planning a group trip, which involved intra-group dynamic interaction. My research tries to investigate the intra-group interaction, take advantage of it to understand one group travellers, and design tools to help them collaborate in the planning process.

Current Work: An empirical study was conducted to collect in-depth data in terms of real travellers’ planning behaviour. 12 groups’ 2015 summer vacation planning were investigated through a diary study and a follow-up interview. This study tried to explore how technology might support the group planning process. Preliminary results show that group’s information search, division of labour and intra-group communication are the most distinguishing characteristics. Requirements to facilitate group planning experience have been concluded from the perspectives of tourism information presentation and intra-group interaction. On the other hand, Chinese participants have expressed unique comments in the interviews and I think it might be interesting to focus on Chinese users’ requirements at some point.

Future Work: To get comprehensive insights, future studies will validate the concluded requirements in further empirical qualitative and quantitative studies. I will explore differences in different types of tourist groups and evaluate design feasibilities in terms of technical realisation and impacts on user experience.