“MIKUNA” Mobile Application for Tourism Promotion of Local Cuisine of the Ecuadorian Highlands

Currently, tourism is one of the major sources of income in different countries of the world, providing a livelihood for many families who live around the activity of internal and external tourists. The objective of this research is to create a mobile application using the geolocation module to help tourists to know places that offer local gastronomy, that is, the typical food of different areas, especially in the Ecuadorian highlands, where options of these places are presented and through geolocation on a map a route is traced to reach the site. The name of the mobile application is MIKUNA. Mikuna comes from the word in Quichua, an ancestral Ecuadorian language, which means food. It differs from other applications, since initially an inventory was made of the places to visit and that do not have more references for the tourist to reach. To achieve the research objective, a mobile application was developed using a tool for non-developers called GoodBarber, supported by the ADDIE methodology. Once the app was developed, it was presented to the students of Tourism who provided feedback to the development, through the TAM model, to measure the acceptance of the app. The results obtained showed a high level of acceptance in terms of its design, navigability and intuitiveness.