Travel Safety: A Social Media Enabled Mobile Travel Risk Application

We present the design artifact Travel Safety, a mobile travel risk information system (IS). Besides offering general travel risk information, the iPhone application leverages social media, in particular Twitter, to source travel risk information from multiple foreign offices. This provides a comprehensive real-time information base for the application and enables dispatch of automatic travel warnings. On the basis of Travel Safety we want to explore if content from social media can be leveraged to increase the attractiveness and usage of applications. Furthermore, we want to understand critical success factors in the context of using social media content. Travel Safety was evaluated in a large field study with 422 participants. The study reveals that applications can indeed successfully be enriched by social media content. However, our results also reveal that a fully automated sourcing of social media content without human content management bears significant challenges.