Readiness, Seamlessness and Connectedness: Understanding Business Travellers’ Door to Door Journeys

Understanding how digital technologies influence peoples' mobility is becoming a substantial research topic within the HCI community. Here, we present a study of the roles that digital technologies play within the context of door-to-door business travel. We approached business travel as an integrated whole instead of a collection of multiple travel segments, and our research approach was influenced by social practice by focusing on the meaning, materials and competences brought forward by a group of frequent business travelers that we interviewed. Our data analysis followed an iterative, inductive approach and our primary contribution is the identification of three aspects of relevance for the business travel practice: readiness, seamlessness and connectedness. Readiness relates to business travelers preparing for a journey, seamlessness relates to how they realize and react when a trip is going (or not) according to plan, and connectedness centers on how travelers balance between work and non-work activities. We conclude by discussing these three aspects and by identifying socially shared desirable expectations and design potentials for an integrated door-to-door travel solution.