Location-Enabled Gamification in Tour Guide Mobile Application A Strategy Matrix for Surakarta Cultural Tourism Destination

This research aims to formulate a competitive strategy for a mobile tourism guide application. The case study examines the “Solo Destination” app, a tourism promotion tool developed by the Surakarta City Government. Simultaneously, the data collection started by interviewing 100 active users of the “Solo Destination” app to obtain qualitative data. Qualitative data goes through the stages of data selection and coding. The data selection and coding stages break down the attributes that represent the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the “Solo Destination” application. Pairwise comparisons with AHP are an advanced stage involving key respondents, including the Head of the Tourism Office, the Head of the Communication and Information Service, the Manager of the Central Bureau of Statistics, and the creator of the “Solo Destination” application. Based on prioritization measurements using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), this research found that adding the location-enabled gamification feature is a relevant strategy for improving and developing the “Solo Destination” app. The results of this study offer the issue of location-enabled gamification in a tour guide application as a novelty. However, involving more than one tour guide application as the object of research presents limitations to this research. It requires further research to analyze more examples of cases or a broader scope to take a closer look at how strategically a location-enabled gamification feature is embedded in a tour guide mobile app.