Flashpacker and the influence of technological advances : a case study in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

Abstract

The emergence of backpackers started from Grand Tours to Tramping, and from Drifter to Hippy’s. On 1990’s, the term backpackers have been used in academic literature and ‘backpackers’ has been a trendsetter as a latest travel lifestyle. From time to time, the development of the technology has created another new segmentation of backpackers, which is called flashpackers, who is tech savvy that connect with other people virtually as long as they bring technology tools such as smartphone. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to study on the flashpackers’ travel behavior towards technological advancement. In depth, the travel behavior of the flashpackers which associated with physical travel, backpacker culture and the convergence of the information and communication technologies were looked at. Technology has contributed to the emergence of the new term flashpacker, where traditional backpacker has now become more involved with technology. This has led to the motivation of this study, by looking at the effect and relationship of technology towards the traditional backpacker’s behavior and culture. Furthermore, there are a major gap in the study of flashpackers and technology in tourism research, and there are no established criteria to distinguish the term of flashpacker. The objectives of this thesis are achieved by using quantitative method has been applied in the main research. A total of 100 respondents participated in the survey. The respondents of this study represent backpackers from international and local tourists through different background. The Data gathered from the survey stage via self-administered questionnaire (SQA) and online questionnaire. The questionnaire was coded and entered into a database system in SPSS. There are three analysis data in this research, which is descriptive analysis, crosstabulation and mean analysis. Finally, the findings provide important insight into the usage and meanings associated with flashpackers travel behaviour and the role of technological in flashpackers’ life.