Abstract
Despite the increasing adoption of gamification and its huge potential in tourism, research in gamification is still limited. As preliminary findings show that the effectiveness of gamification depends on the context of its application and the players' use of the gamified app, this paper fills in these gaps: by exploring and analysing the application of gamification in a specific e-commerce tourism context; and assessing the gamification's effectiveness by measuring the players' gamification usage and the latter's behavioural and psychological outcomes. The gamified TripAdvisor website and its Facebook enabled gamification app are used as the specific context of the study. Findings from a survey conducted on TripAdvisor users provide useful practical and theoretical implications to gamification designers and researchers alike on how game mechanics can be designed for enhancing the users' motivation, flow, task involvement and engagement with the 'play' tasks, and so, increasing the gamification's effectiveness.