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Who is interested in digital travel? In particular, what are the personal traits of individuals that use digital alternatives to physical travel? The objective of this follow-up paper was to develop more accurate answers to these questions. Our earlier work had shown that two characteristics distinguish people who are positive to digital travel vs. those that are not: optimism, as measured with the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, and resistance to peer influence, measured with the Steinberger and Monahan RIP-questionnaire. The first study took place during the Covid-19 pandemic – a time with travel restrictions. To expand on our findings in the first study, we commissioned a new, larger, national survey with 604 travellers to analyse whether these two characteristics can be used to identify those with a positive view of digital travel. In both studies we asked our participants to judge digital travel based on specific questions about museums, attractions, and guided tours. In the current study, resistance to peer influence was predictive of the likelihood of users accepting digital travel technologies but user optimism was not.

In this article we look at two of the principle ways in which digital technology may plausibly change the nature of, and to some extent replace, physical travel. The most obvious is to simulate another place as a virtual reality, one that can convey a convincing sense of being there. This can be seen as making the digital world more physical, as far as the user’s experience is concerned, and is a strong form of digital travel. Video gaming and some work with therapeutic applications for relaxation, regeneration and exercise point to the potential of this kind of digital travel to have a wider and more engaging role in the future. In contrast, widely used and accepted systems for on-line meetings, and various phone apps providing location-sensitive information to their users, and also augmented reality approaches (none of which convey a strong sense of being in another location), suggest another approach - that of making the physical world more digital. We characterise this as a weaker form of digital travel. To examine people’s attitudes to these two approaches, we created two fictional scenarios, each exemplifying key characteristics of these forms of digital travel. We report opinion ratings about the two scenarios, focusing on participants opinions of their realism, their likelihood to become common practice, and their suitability for different purposes. Finally, we speculate about the possible future for designed digital travel experiences.

Communities are aging and becoming more segregated, leading to fractured relationships between generations. Intergenerational exchange has improved cohesion, particularly when different generations engage as equal partners. This paper presents a systematic review of intergenerational studies between adolescents and older adults. Thirteen papers were reviewed using PRISMA guidelines, and outcomes, methodological quality, facilitators, and barriers identified, to better understand effectiveness and inform recommendations for future practice. The framework informed quality assessment, and the papers were rated moderate or high quality. Unfortunately, heterogeneity across studies rendered comparison challenging. Further attention is required to elucidate guidelines for implementing and reporting intergenerational studies.Contribution to the Field 

This review demonstrated how non-familial intergenerational programs involving adolescents and older adults provided benefits to both. Benefits for older adults included improved wellbeing, cognitive, and social engagement.Benefits for adolescents were identity formation and skill development. Shared outcomes for both generations were improved attitudes and stereotypes, reduced generational gap, and solidarity.High variability in program design, methodology, and sample size was evident across studies. However, it highlighted the suitability of IG engagement across differing contexts.Future recommendations included facilitator training, diverse samples, and longitudinal methodological designs.

The research objective of this study was to investigate factors contributing to phishing susceptibility, expanding on findings from previousstudies. We report results based on five, large-scale surveys of national populations from which we collecteddata about cognitive strategies using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), privacy attitudes, data disclosure behaviors, and demographic variables. We used binary logistic regression to analyze the relationship between these factors and susceptibility to phishing attacks. Wefound that willingness to share personal data and CRTscores significantly predicted phishing susceptibility.Younger people were somewhat more susceptible than older age-groups. as were males than females. Importantly, these findings suggest that phishing susceptibility is not simply a function of cognitivea bility, but also of individual differences in privacy attitudes and data disclosure behaviors. Their credibility is enhanced by the use of five large-scale studies with national populations, unlike earlier studies primarily relying on smaller-scale student populations.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital alternatives to office-work, classroom teaching, business meetings and leisure activities etc. were seen by most as a supplement to, not a replacement for, meeting people face-to-face. With the experiences many have had these last two years, including travel restrictions, vacationers' views of digital travel might be expected to have changed. This study is based on surveys of views on digital travel in the summers of 2021 and 2022. We presented vacationers with descriptions of digital travel products and activities, followed by questions about willingness to pay for these. We identified a small segment of vacationers who see digital travel as a substitute for physical travel, and a significant group of vacationers who see the digital travel experience as a pre-taste of actual travel. The vacationers were asked for comparisons of their willingness to pay for digital services with ticket prices that a tourist would normally pay at a destination. Although we could identify a market for digital travel products, it remains to be seen whether players in the travel industry can offer products and services that are attractive enough to raise significant revenue. There is not necessarily a high correlation between intention to pay and actual willingness to make payments, but the study indicates that there is an emergent market that businesses in the travel economy can potentially utilize.

Despite popular misconception it is not only young people that are sharing nude pictures and videos. There are a number of studies targeted towards the younger generation about their sexting, but few on older age-groups. In general, younger people take more risk than older people, and some seem to care less about possible negative consequences. For this study we commissioned a market research company to collect data from a national population, with a representative sample from 16 to 69 years old, in total 1071 citizens. We used binary logistic regression for the analysis of responses, a method that can be used to predict a categorical dependent variable – in our case whether a person has been sexting the last 12 months or not. In the study we included the following independent variables: gender, education, self-efficacy; the cognitive reflection test (CRT) to distinguish between a intuitive versus analytical decision style; Machiavellianism, to distinguish a personality trait characterized by manipulativeness and deceitfulness; willingness to share personal data, and finally whether the citizens had experience of ID-theft or credit-card misuse within the previous 12 months. Our results show that the ID-theft/credit-card variable was a significant predictor of sexting for the age-groups 16-29, 30-39 and 50-69 years old. For youngest group, the manipulativeness and deceitfulness trait is also a predictor, whereas for the oldest group, the intuitive decision style and a high willingness to share personal data are also significant predictors.

Dark patterns refer to tricks used in websites and apps to make you do things that you do not intend to do. This paper presents the board-game Dark Pattern, in which players install apps, draw dark patterns cards, and make choices about the sharing of personal data. To win the game, a player must share as little data as possible and play cards that punish other play-ers. Two groups, the first with 56 students and the second with 45 students, played the game and then answered a survey with questions controlling their knowledge about the dark patterns types featured in the game. In addi-tion, a further 50 students answered the same survey without playing the game. In this paper we present key findings about the dark patterns knowledge generated by playing the game. Then we present an exploratory analysis using Partial Least Square – Structural Equation modelling (PLS-SEM). We analysed whether dark patterns knowledge and risk perception, the likelihood of negative incidents due to data sharing, could predict the players behavioural intention to take proactive privacy steps. The two PLS-SEM models have a variance explained (R2) of 0.34 and 0.35 indicating that approximately 35% of the variance could be accounted for by the two vari-ables included in the model. Taken together, the analyses indicated that playing the Dark Pattern game had a positive effect on behavioural inten-tion to proactive privacy steps as a result of by playing the game.

In this study, we invited members of a Norwegian national survey-panel to give their views on digital travel applications and digital travel experiences, and to consider Mexico as a travel destination. We presented vacationers with descriptions of digital travel products and activities, and a video about Mexico made from the game Horizon Forza 5. We used Partial Least Square-Structural Equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to analyse whether digital presentations, sense of place, and travel motivation could predict intention to visit Mexico. The analysis showed that vicarious sense of place was the best predictor of future intentions. As the study is based on survey data from a national population, a reasonable degree of generalisability, at least for Norway and other Scandinavian countries, is to be expected. It shows that there is a small but emergent market for digital travel and virtual tourism. More importantly, the study indicates that a digital experience in a virtual environment - specifically, that of a vicarious sense of place - can stimulate and motivate vacationers to travel to a tourist destination and hence that there are opportunities which businesses in the travel economy can potentially utilize.

Despite limitations in the way digital travel is currently realized, more and more encounters with other people and, to a lesser but significant extent, other places are already digital. Meeting applications such as Zoom and Teams are the most obvious, albeit that they are very weak examples of digital travel, since almost no sense of traveling is experienced by participants. Many people enjoy computer games that take them to sometimes very realistic 3D places, which may be fictional, fantasy, or actual places. In addition to the public health benefits of reduced physical travel, these changes have had a positive environmental impact by lowering the consumption of fossil fuels, especially by cars and planes. Since the end of pandemic restrictions, there has been a partial “bounce back” in numbers of international tourists. Current forms of digital travel do not fully match the psychosocial appeal of physical travel. The key question behind all the papers selected for publication in this special issue is: How can digital travel be improved to meet the psychosocial needs of participants better so that its areas of acceptable and beneficial use are expanded?

The covid-19 pandemic, and the restrictions on physical meetings and travel that came with it, have had an impact on how people think about travel and digital alternatives to physical travel. In this study, we asked what the characteristics of tomorrow’s digital travellers might be. 100 members of survey panels were invited to give their views on digital travel applications and digital travel experiences. We used binary logistics to analyse the data that contained both demographics and personal characteristics of the travellers. We distinguish between two groups: the travellers with a positive view of digital travel vs. the travellers who did not share this view. The positive-to-digital travellers were those that stated that a digital travel experience could be similar to the physical experience or that it can substitute for a visit to a tourist destination. The analysis showed that two individual characteristics were more common among those positive to digital travel: optimism, as measured with the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, and resistance to peer influence, measured with the Steinberger and Monahan RPI questionnaire.