Evaluating Mobile Gamification Against Tourists’ Cultural Perception and Culinary Wisdom: A Case Study of Phuket’s Local Food

Applying mobile gamification in the gastronomy tourism industry is an intriguing challenge. Phuket is a city with a culinary heritage. This study examined Thai domestic tourists’ perceptions of WISKET42, a mobile web-based gamification application designed to support the communication of Phuket’s local culinary culture and wisdom. The mobile web-based gamification application “WISKET42” was tested. Data collection was carried out using a questionnaire after the gamification application was tried out to study data that were collected from Thai tourists with and without tourism experience in Phuket (n = 428). This study indicated significant differences among travel-experience groups across all four dimensions: convenience, usefulness, safety and reliability, and uniqueness. However, the relatively small effect sizes (η2 = 0.019–0.041) indicated that prior travel experience was associated with only a modest proportion of the observed variation in participants’ perceptions. Comparisons further showed that the pairwise differences were selective rather than uniform across travel-experience groups. Multiple regression analysis showed that convenience, safety and reliability, and uniqueness were positively and significantly associated with usefulness, jointly accounting for 59.9% of its variance (R2 = 0.599). Uniqueness exhibited the largest standardized coefficient (β = 0.305), followed closely by safety and reliability (β = 0.279) and convenience (β = 0.277). These findings suggest that WISKET42 has potential as an interactive digital approach to communicating Phuket’s culinary heritage, while prior destination experience appears to represent a modest contextual factor in users’ perceptions. The study focuses only on Thai participants, possibly misrepresenting the behavior and technology acceptance of foreign tourists and limiting the generalizability of the results to universal contexts. Future research should include international tourists for more inclusiveness in comparing the differences in perception, technology acceptance, and culinary heritage learning behavior across cultural contexts.